


REFERENTIE DOCUMENT

by Wonsiqq



Category: None. - Fandom
Genre: Other
Language: Nederlands
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-06 00:54:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17929688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wonsiqq/pseuds/Wonsiqq
Summary: Hoofdstukken zijn thema's





	1. ON WRITING: 1. TONI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1888/toni-morrison-the-art-of-fiction-no-134-toni-morrison  
> https://lithub.com/you-dont-know-anything-and-other-writing-advice-from-toni-morrison/  
> https://granta.com/toni-morrison-conversation/  
> https://www.arts.gov/NEARTS/2014v4-art-failure-importance-risk-and-experimentation/toni-morrison  
> https://www.oprah.com/omagazine/toni-morrison-on-writing

**TONI**

 

 

_THE PARIS REVIEW_

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

> **Seek holiness.**

What I’m going to say is going to sound so pompous, but I think an artist, whether it’s a painter or a writer, it’s almost holy. There’s something about the vision, the wisdom. **You can be a nobody, but seeing that way, it’s holy, it’s godlike.** It’s above the normal life and perception of all of us, normally. You step up. And as long as you’re up there, even if you’re a terrible person—especially if you’re a terrible person—you see things that come together, and shake you, or move you, or clarify something for you that outside of your art you would not have known. It really is a vision above, or beyond. Don’t write what you know. I may be wrong about this, but it seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play. When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. **Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through.** I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.  

 

 

 

 

_GRANTA_

 

* * *

 

 

 _Sarah:  
_One of the refrains in your books is the tension between memory and forgetting – **forgetting as a way of overcoming.** It’s in Beloved, with this repeated line: ‘It was not a story to pass on.’ It’s in God Help the Child, where you write that ‘memory is the worst thing about healing.’ How do you deal with this tension?

 _Toni:_ In order to get to a happy place – what I call happy, even though people are dropping dead all over my books – is the acquisition of knowledge. If you know something at the end that you didn’t know before, it’s almost wisdom. And if I can hit that chord, then everything else was worth it. Knowing something you didn’t know before. Becoming something. There are certain patterns in the books and in life that look like they’re going one way. And then something happens and people learn. God Help the Child, which I thought was a horrible title . . .

 _Mario:_ What title would you have given the book?

 _Toni:_ I think I gave it one. I don’t remember what it was. It was beautiful!

 _Sarah:_ Why did you not get your own way?

 _Toni:_ **Because they beat you up.**

 _Sarah:_ Isn’t that one of the privileges of winning the Nobel Prize – that you can tell people what to do?

 _Toni:_ No! (She imagines an argument with her publisher.) ‘Go fuck yourself, this is my title!’ – ‘No, you don’t get to get that!’ They think they’re doing you a favor by publishing it, even though they’re making tons of money – and will forever. After I die, after my children die, my grandchildren, they’ll still be making money. I worked in that industry for a long time. I’m unimpressed. So, what were we talking about?

 _Sarah:_ The tension between memory and forgetting.

 

 _Sarah:_ Baldwin once said,

  

 

 

 

> **‘The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.’**
> 
>  

 

 

 

_NEA ARTS_

 

* * *

 

 

  _Getting Started_  
Writing for me is thinking, and it’s also a way to position myself in the world, particularly when I don’t like what’s going on. It’s extremely important to me. [Confidence] came with time. I knew I always was compelled to do it, but I didn’t know how essential it was to me.

I wrote the first book because I wanted to read it. I thought that kind of book, with that subject—those most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously little black girls—had never existed seriously in literature. No one had ever written about them except as props. Since I couldn’t find a book that did that, I thought, “Well, I’ll write it and then I’ll read it.” **It was really the reading impulse that got me into the writing thing.**

 

 _Success in the Morning_  
I used to get up before sunrise. **I’m very, very smart in the morning, and everything is clear. By noon it’s over.** Then as the day wore on, I got dumber and dumber. That used to be my habit. I thought I did it because I had small children and I wanted to write before they got up. But then when they grew, I was still doing it and still preferring it. Not anymore because I’m too old. I’m 83, so some of those habits have changed.

 

 

 

 

 

 _O MAGAZINE_  

 

* * *

 

 

 

_Pam Houston_ : Lots has been written about the difficulty of writing, how murderous it is to face a blank page, but how does it feel when it goes well, what do you think is activated when it all starts to come together?

 

_Toni Morrison:_  Yeah. That is a beautiful sort of open and closed world. Open because anything can happen, and you don't always know, you are just eager to follow, and closed because it is yours, completely yours, and other things outside of it are very secondary, almost irrelevant.

After I finished  _The Bluest Eye,_  which took me five years to write, I went into a long period of...not deep depression but a kind of melancholy. Then I had another idea for a book,  _Sula,_  where I was trying to write about real friendship between women—and the whole world came alive again. **Everything I saw or did was potentially data, a word or a sound or something for the book, and then I really realized that for me writing meant having something coherent in the world. And that feels like...not exactly what I was born for, it's more the thing that holds me in the world in healthy relationship, with language, with people, bits of everything filter down, and I can stay here.** Everything I see or do, the weather and the water, buildings...everything  _actual_  is an advantage when I am writing. It is like a menu, or a giant tool box, and I can pick and choose what I want. **When I am not writing, or more important, when I have nothing on my mind for a book, then I see chaos, confusion, disorder.**

Right now I have been thinking about a time, a place, some characters I want to write about. And then one day I got this powerful image of horses fighting. The sentence I heard was "They stood up like men." So I followed that. This little kid and his sister are watching the horses, and the scene holds something terrifying, awe-inspiring, enviable, for them. I thought to myself, "What am I talking about? I've never seen horses fighting. Do they even stand up?" So I ran around and I got some films, and of course horses bite a lot when they fight, but they do stand up. I don't know where it came from—this picture of the horses—but once it was there, I  _knew_  the kid, this character who is a child, who is black and vulnerable and living in the '50s in a place where race circumscribes him. And the look of the horses is one thing—and the violence involved—but the other thing is the "like men" part of the sentence, the "how to be a man" part; that notion is what is important to the boy.

> **So I go forward...starting out with an image, even if I don't know yet how to squeeze it, how to use it. It is trusting that picture that keeps me going.**

 


	2. SPUUGMEISJE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> file:///C:/Users/Gebruiker/Downloads/ob169-volledige-tekst_tcm44-435232.pdf [Meisjescriminaliteit in Nederland]

  _MEISJESCRIMINALITEIT IN NEDERLAND_

N.M. Mertens  
M. Grapendaal  
B.J.W. Docter-Schamhardt

* * *

 

 

 

 

Bovendien wordt deviant en crimineel gedrag als typisch mannelijk gedrag gezien. Dergelijk gedrag past niet in het traditionele vrouwbeeld, waarin huiselijkheid, gehoorzaamheid en afhankelijkheid het (goede) gedrag van vrouwen bepalen. **Crimineel gedrag wordt beschouwd als afwijkend gedrag voor vrouwen.** Het wordt of stilgezwegen, of in de seksuele sfeer getrokken, aldus Miedema en Eelman. In het eerste geval wordt criminaliteit van vrouwen niet serieus genomen; het aandeel van vrouwen in het totaal van de geregistreerde criminaliteit is gering en het is ook lange tijd stabiel gebleven. Daarbij komt dat vrouwencriminaliteit vooral uit kleine, niet-gewelddadige vermogensdelicten bestaat en bijgevolg weinig spectaculair is. In het laatste geval wordt het strafbare gedrag van de vrouw gepathologiseerd of gepsychiatriseerd: de vrouw in kwestie is ziek en moet geholpen worden. Niet het strafbare feit op zich wordt aangepakt, **maar het seksueel afwijkende in het vrouwelijke gedrag is reden om in te grijpen**.

 

* * *

 

 

_NOOT_

 

 

 

 

> 8 Bouw e.a. (1988) noemen naast het slachtoffer- en het daderschap nog een derde aspect van vrouwen in relatie tot criminaliteit. **Vrouwen hebben een corrigerende functie als vaste vriendin of partner van (criminele) mannen.** De bijdrage van vrouwen en meisjes aan het regulerings- en socialisatieproces van mannen en jongens wordt hier verder buiten beschouwing gelaten.
> 
>  

* * *

 

 

Volgens Lombroso (zie Rutenfrans, 1989, p. 23) is crimineel gedrag mannelijk gedrag. Het misdadigerstype pur sang dat bij mannen wel voorkomt, is uitzonderlijk voor vrouwen. Vrouwelijke delinquenten zouden ook minder afwijkend zijn dan mannelijke. **Vrouwen zijn niet zozeer geneigd in criminaliteit te vervallen als wel in prostitutie.** **Zowel anatomisch als psychologisch zouden 'geboren misdadigers' en 'geboren prostituées' grote overeenkomsten vertonen.**

 

De verschillen in variabiliteit tussen mannen en vrouwen heeft volgens Lombroso tot gevolg dat degeneratiekenmerken (regressie naar een primitief stadium van de menselijke evolutie) bij vrouwen minder voorkomen en minder ernstig zijn.10 Door die geringe variabiliteit zouden vrouwen geneigd zijn tot conservatisme (gemeenschappelijke kenmerken vasthouden) en over een groot uithoudingsvermogen beschikken. Vrouwen zouden ook minder intelligent zijn en over minder fysieke kracht beschikken dan mannen, wat hen volgens Lombroso **ongeschikt maakt voor criminaliteit.**

 

 

 

 

>  
> 
>  

* * *

 

 

 Zo onderschrijft Rutenfrans (1989) de bewering dat er verschillen zijn in variabiliteit tussen mannen en vrouwen. **Mannen zouden gekenmerkt worden door variabiliteit en dominantiegerichtheid, vrouwen door stabiliteit en relatiegerichtheid zijn.** Deze fundamentele verschillen liggen ten grondslag aan verschillen in gedrag van beide seksen. Hij onderbouwt deze bewering niet met behulp van de atavismetheorie van Lombroso, maar met theorieën en onderzoek van diverse disciplines waaronder de biologie en de ethologie. In de loop van de evolutie hebben zich bij de hogere diersoorten evenals bij de mens geslachtsspecifieke eigenschappen ontwikkeld in wisselwerking met de omgeving. De neiging tot geringe variabiliteit bij vrouwen en tot sterkere variabiliteit bij mannen heeft te maken met de functies die de seksen hebben voor de overleving van de soort. Menselijk gedrag is net als gedrag bij primaten tot op zekere hoogte genetisch bepaald. **De mate waarin sekseverschillen zich openbaren is dan weer afhankelijk van de eisen die de omgeving stelt.** Ook de genetica Moir is ervan overtuigd dat biologische verschillen tussen mannen en vrouwen ten grondslag liggen aan verschillen in gedrag, onder meer agressief en crimineel gedrag (Moir en Jessel, 1995). Deze auteurs wijzen op de verschillen tussen de seksen in genetische bagage en in de hormoonhuishouding die aannemelijk maken dat agressiviteit, gewelddadigheid en criminaliteit bij uitstek door mannen worden vertoond. Crimineel gedrag is volgens Moir en lessel de resultante van een combinatie van verschillende factoren (biologische, sociale, economische en opvoedkundige) [RED.shbab  _Habitus dus_ ] die op elkaar inwerken. De biologische determinant is geen onbelangrijke, maar is wel zo goed als altijd door criminologen genegeerd. Voor zover bekend hebben de biologische oorzaken van onder meer agressief gedrag te maken met genetische verschillen en afwijkingen, verandering en verstoring van de hormoonhuishouding, met hersenbeschadiging of een combinatie daarvan. **In vrijwel alle culturen zijn jongens agressiever dan meisjes (Farrington, 1987) en dat verschil bestaat reeds voordat kinderen beseffen dat ze een jongen of een meisje zijn** (zie Angenent, 1991, p. 31). Er is ook een kwalitatief verschil: jongens vertonen meer fysieke agressie (vechten, vernielen) terwijl meisjes hun agressie verbaal uiten (roddelen, bekvechten; Angenent, 1991). Verklaringen voor het impulsieve, gewelddadige en sensatiebeluste gedrag van jongens en mannen worden gezocht in de complexe wisselwerking van androgene hormonen, neurotransmitters en hersenstructuur.

 

 

* * *

 

 

2.3.2 Psychologische verklaringen

    _De vrouwelijke psyche_

Als eerste vrouwelijke criminoloog trachtte Clara Wichmann (1918) uit te zoeken welk belang biologische, psychische en sociale factoren hebben in de verklaring van de geringe vrouwencriminaliteit. Wichmann is het niet eens met Bonger (1916) die de mening is toegedaan dat het verschil in sociale positie tussen mannen en vrouwen - in casu de geringe maatschappelijke deelname van vrouwen - het grote verschil in omvang van criminaliteit verklaart. Z **ij stelt dat de verschillende sociale positie slechts gedeeltelijk de geringe omvang van vrouwencriminaliteit verklaart: niet de sociale omstandigheden op zichzelf maar de verschillende wijze waarop vrouwen en mannen op dezelfde omstandigheden reageren, is van doorslaggevend belang.** De maatschappelijke positie en het gedrag van vrouwen worden beïnvloed door hun fysieke en psychische aanleg. Als belangrijkste biologische eigenschap in dit verband noemt zij hun minder agressieve aanleg. Vrouwen hebben bovendien een sterker ontwikkeld gevoel van medelijden dan mannen. De eigen aard van de vrouwelijke psyche en het vrouwenleven maken dat zij zich minder frequent dan mannen in goede en kwade daden manifesteren. **Uit onderzoek concludeert Wichmann dat juist de aard van het criminele gedrag van vrouwen samenhangt met hun sociale positie.** Vrouwen met een beroep plegen overwegend vermogensmisdrijven en vrouwen zonder beroep begaan veelal geweldsmisdrijven. Verandering in de sociale positie van vrouwen zal volgens haar dan ook niet leiden tot een toename van vrouwencriminaliteit maar tot een verandering van de _aard_ ervan.

 

Net als Wichmann bespeurt ook Hudig (1939) een verschil in de wijze waarop mannen en vrouwen op sociale omstandigheden reageren. De omstandigheden dienen voor vrouwen ongunstiger te zijn dan voor mannen vooraleer ze overgaan tot crimineel gedrag. Gunstige omstandigheden beschermen vrouwen tegen criminaliteit: vrouwen zouden gevoeliger zijn voor dergelijke omstandigheden dan mannen. Ook Thomas (1923) is de mening toegedaan dat bij vrouwen een sterkere criminaliteitsremmende factor van toepassing is dan bij mannen. Het gegeven dat bepaalde omstandigheden een criminogene werking hebben bij mannen en niet of veel minder bij vrouwen, wordt door Hudig verklaard door het grotere aanpassingsvermogen van vrouwen. **Zij schikken zich in de gegeven omstandigheden omdat zij een grotere behoefte hebben aan harmonie met de omgeving**. **Dit vermogen om zich aan te passen aan de omgeving ligt, aldus Hudig, in de psychische aard van de vrouw.** Vrouwen hebben volgens haar een fijner gevoel voor menselijke verhoudingen dan mannen, wat een constituerende factor zou zijn van de grotere psychische weerstand van vrouwen. Kempe (1947) is dezelfde mening toegedaan, zij het dat hij ook nog een verschil in moraal veronderstelt evenals seksespecifieke deugden. **Dát vrouwen toch tot criminaliteit overgaan, verklaren Wichman, Hudig en Thomas uit het voorkomen van zo extreme omstandigheden dat ook de weerstand van vrouwen er niet tegen bestand is, danwel dat de seksespecifieke criminaliteitsremmende factor in minder sterke mate aanwezig is.** Laatstgenoemde factor bestaat er volgens deze auteurs uit dat vrouwen, meer dan mannen, gericht zijn op een goede relatie met anderen (Rutenfrans, 1989). Indien die relatie niet of slechts zeer gebrekkig totstandkomt, wordt de kans op crimineel gedrag aanmerkelijk groter. Meisjes en jongens zouden verschillend reageren op een verstoorde gezinssituatie. Zo constateert Thomas dat delinquente meisjes als kind meer hebben geleden onder een ongelukkig gezinsleven dan delinquente jongens. Meer meisjes dan jongens die met de politie in aanraking komen, zijn afkomstig uit één-oudergezinnen (Kratcoski, 1974). Volgens Konopka (1966) ligt de belangrijkste oorzaak van meisjescriminaliteit in het ontbreken van een redelijk bevredigende affectieve relatie vanaf de eerste levensjaren met de ouders. **Daaruit volgt een blijvende (onbevredigde) afhankelijkheidsbehoefte en een onvermogen bij deze meisjes om langdurige peroonlijke relaties aan te gaan. Delinquente meisjes zijn extreem eenzaam, hebben een laag zelfbeeld en zijn geneigd de autoriteiten in het gezin, op school en in de samenleving als geheel niet te zien als personen met wie ze een relatie hebben maar als vreemden.** Rutenfrans (1989) concludeert uit de psychologische verklaringen die wijzen op een groter weerstandsvermogen en een seksespecifieke criminaliteit belemmerende factor bij vrouwen het volgende. Naar alle waarschijnlijkheid zijn relationele problemen meer bij vrouwen dan bij mannen een noodzakelijke voorwaarde voor het optreden van crimineel gedrag. **Bovendien zouden deze problemen voor vrouwen ernstiger moeten zijn dan voor mannen alvorens zij tot criminaliteit overgaan.**

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

_De vrouwelijke moraal_

Over de morele ontwikkeling en de verschillen in morele opvattingen van mannen en vrouwen zijn verschillende theorieën ontwikkeld (Lissenberg, 1993). Zo ontwikkelde Kohlberg (1969) een psychologisch model van morele ontwikkeling bij kinderen waarin drie stadia worden onderscheiden. In dit model wordt morele ontwikkeling geformuleerd in termen van rechten en rechtvaardigheid:

  * Het eerste, het preconventionele stadium wordt gekenmerkt door een egoïstisch normbesef: goed en kwaad worden bepaald door de gevolgen (beloning of straf).
  * In het tweede, het conventionele stadium worden regels nageleefd omdat ze algemeen aanvaard worden.
  * Het derde en tevens hoogste stadium, het postconventionele stadium, wordt gekenmerkt door een onafhankelijk streven naar morele principes.



Volgens Kohlberg komen meisjes en vrouwen over het algemeen niet verder dan het conventionele stadium in hun oplossingen voor morele dilemma's, terwijl jongens en mannen in staat zijn het postconventionele stadium te bereiken. Gilligan (zie Lissenberg, 1993, p. 106) ontwikkelde een andere, op vrouwen georiënteerde theorie als reactie op Kohlbergs rechtvaardigheidstheorie. **Vrouwen en mannen hebben een verschillende ethiek volgens deze feministe.** De verklaring voor de verschillen in morele oriëntatie zoekt zij in inherente verschillen tussen de seksen. **In haar model van de ontwikkeling van de vrouwelijke moraal worden de stadia in termen van zorgzaamheid en verantwoordelijkheid in menselijke relaties geformuleerd. Vrouwen en meisjes interpreteren morele dilemma's niet in termen van rechten en rechtvaardigheid, meent Gilligan, maar als relatieproblemen, waarin strijdige verantwoordelijkheden spelen.** De kritiek die op Gilligans zorgzaamheidstheorie volgde, luidde dat de verschillen in morele oriëntatie niet alleen verband houden met geslacht en de machtsongelijkheid die daarmee verbonden is, maar met verhoudingen van onder- en bovengeschiktheid in het algemeen (Lissenberg, 1993). Lissenberg spreekt dan ook liever over een ethiek van rechten en een ethiek van plichten als zij de ethische visies van respectievelijk Kohlberg en Gilligan benoemt. Zij meent op haar beurt dat de verschillen in ethische visie tussen meer en minder machtigen te maken hebben met hun respectievelijke aandeel in het geheel van rechten en plichten. De ondergeschikten maken zich een ethiek van plichten eigen die complementair is aan de ethiek van rechten die typerend is voor de bovengeschikten. In de verhouding tussen mannen en vrouwen ziet Lissenberg dat mannen vooral plichten (en daarbijbehorende rechten) hebben op het hooggewaardeerde publieke domein en dat de plichten van vrouwen zich op het veel minder gewaardeerde privédomein situeren. Het belangrijkste verschil volgens deze auteur is dat de plichten van mannen vooral betaalde zijn en die van vrouwen vooral onbetaalde, waarin een verschil in waardering voor het nakomen van deze plichten besloten ligt. Vrouwen ontlenen aan hun onbetaalde plichten (bijvoorbeeld de zorg voor kinderen) weinig status. Zij komen ook niet in aanmerking voor positieve waardering of beloning als zij plichten nakomen in de privé-sfeer, ook al omdat niet duidelijk is wat er nu precies van hen verwacht wordt. **Waar het vrouwen ontbreekt aan mogelijkheden om positief gesanctioneerd te worden, zullen zij strategieën ontwikkelen om in ieder geval negatieve sancties te ontlopen.** Lissenberg formuleert drie manieren die minder machtigen hanteren om negatieve reacties te voorkomen.

  * Eén strategie is dat men zich netjes houdt aan zijn of haar plichten.
  * Een tweede strategie komt erop neer dat de indruk gewekt wordt dat plichten nagekomen worden terwijl dat feitelijk niet het geval is. Vrouwen zouden zich vaardigheden eigen maken om gelegenheden te herkennen waarin plichtsverzuim ongestraft zou blijven. Volgens Bonger (1916) hebben vrouwen deze gevoeligheid ontwikkeld omdat zij eeuwenlang onderdrukt zijn; de wapens van de onderdrukten zijn leugens en bedrog. **Pollak (1961) gaat nog verder in zijn verklaring door te stellen dat een vrouw op grond van haar biologische constitutie bedreven is in het verbergen van delicten.** Lissenberg ziet in het handelingspatroon van vrouwen - eerder nalaten dan doen - een reden voor het feit dat zo weinig meisjes en vrouwen met politie en justitie in aanraking komen. Het stellen of uitvoeren van daden wordt eerder (strafrechtelijk) bestraft dan het nalaten van handelingen.
  * Tot slot noemt Lissenberg nog een derde strategie van de minder machtigen: zij verschaffen zich toegang tot machtsbronnen van de machtigen. Zo doen zich veranderingen voor in de arbeidsdeling (binnens- en buitenshuis) en in de verhouding tussen mannen en vrouwen, omdat vrouwen langzaam maar zeker meer toegang verwerven tot de betaalde arbeid, een van de traditionele machtsbronnen van mannen. Lissenberg legt een relatie tussen het verwerven van toegang tot machtsbronnen en het plegen van vermogenscriminaliteit door vrouwen.



 

 

* * *

 

 

Morris (1987) geeft een andere invulling aan Mertons anomietheorie. Zij legt de nadruk op de structurele ongelijkheid van kansen voor mannen en vrouwen. Volgens haar zouden vrouwen net als mannen gericht zijn op het behalen van economisch succes, maar de feitelijke mogelijkheden zijn voor vrouwen beperkt. Frustraties zijn hiervan het gevolg. Die ongelijkheid manifesteert zich ook in het huwelijk: mishandeling van vrouwen in echtelijke relaties is daar een schrijnend voorbeeld van. Als het zo zou zijn dat vrouwen in eerste instantie gericht zijn op huwelijk en gezin, dan zouden teleurstellingen in relationeel opzicht en daarbij opgeteld de beknotting tot maatschappelijk succes wel tot grote frustraties moeten leiden bij een heleboel vrouwen en veel vrouwencriminaliteit met zich mee moeten brengen, aldus Morris.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_Roltheorie_

Een aantal auteurs, onder wie Ruth Morris (1964) - niet te verwarren met de eerder aangehaalde Allison Morris - hangt de roltheoretische benadering aan. Volgens deze theorie zijn er duidelijk verschillende rolpatronen voor vrouwen en mannen in de westerse cultuur. Deze rolpatronen zijn een afspiegeling van de culturele opvattingen over hoe vrouwen en mannen behoren te zijn, en zij worden verworven tijdens het socialisatieproces. Bij de ontwikkeling van de seksespecifieke rol zijn drie mechanismen werkzaam (Rutenfrans, 1989). In de eerste plaats wordt rolconformerend gedrag door de omgeving beloond en roldoorbrekend gedrag ontmoedigd. Het tweede mechanisme betreft de (onbewuste) verinnerlijking van de rollen die anderen vervullen, door middel van identificatie met en imitatie van personen die tot hetzelfde geslacht behoren. Tot slot worden ook meer expliciete vormen van conditionering onderscheiden, zoals de ouderlijke en de sociale controle. Ontwikkelingspsychologisch onderzoek heeft aangetoond dat meisjes en jongens met verschillende gedragspatronen in aanraking komen (Van Hezewijk, 1989). In grote lijnen is volgens Van Hezewijk nog steeds sprake van een typisch mannelijk en een typisch vrouwelijk opvoedingspatroon: uit onderzoek is gebleken dat volwassenen anders reageren op gedrag van meisjes dan van jongens. Op jongensgedrag wordt vaker positief gereageerd en hun gedrag wordt gestimuleerd indien het 'instrumenteel' is voor het doel dat ermee wordt bereikt. **Bij meisjes wordt vaker de 'expressiviteit' van het gedrag gestimuleerd.** Franssens (1996) stelt bij persoonlijkheidsonderzoeken van delinquente jongeren die in een opvanginrichting verblijven, vast dat jongens vaker 'activiteitgericht' zijn en meisjes 'relatiegericht'. Bij jongens is de activiteit het doel en het contact met anderen wordt gebruikt om dat doel te bereiken. Bij meisjes is het vaker net andersom: het contact met de anderen staat voorop en de activiteit is daarbij een middel. In een Nederlands onderzoek waarin het opvoedingsgedrag van ouders en de ontwikkeling van het kind centraal staan, wordt geconcludeerd dat vaders en moeders van elkaar verschillen in opvoedingsgedrag en dat er ook duidelijke verschillen zijn in opvoedingsgedrag van ouders ten opzichte van zonen en dochters (Gerrits e.a., 1996). Zowel vaders als moeders tonen meer affectie en genegenheid ten opzichte van meisjes, en ze zijn meer ondersteunend en minder autoritair dan ten opzichte jongens. Deze verschillen in opvoedingsgedrag die samenhangen met het geslacht van het kind, zijn des te opmerkelijker aangezien uit hetzelfde onderzoek blijkt dat ouders van zonen niet verschillen in hun opvoedingsdoelen van ouders met dochters.

De roltheoretische benadering verklaart de (geringe) omvang, de aard van vrouwencriminaliteit en de wijze waarop vrouwen delicten begaan, vanuit de verschillende maatschappelijke rollen die vrouwen en mannen vervullen. **Crimineel gedrag past niet bij de vrouwelijke rol die conformiteit en passiviteit voorhoudt.** De sterkere controle op vrouwen en de geringere toegang tot criminele subculturen voor vrouwen maken dat zij minder criminaliteit aan de dag leggen dan mannen. De relatief veelvuldig door vrouwen gepleegde kleine vermogensdelicten past volgens deze benadering bij de rol van de vrouw als huisvrouw en consumente. Grosser (1951) maakt onderscheid tussen gedrag dat de uitdrukking vormt van de rol die men vervult, en gedrag dat een ondersteuning vormt van die rol. Grosser noemt het steelgedrag van vrouwen rolondersteunend. Het gestolen goed betreft bij vrouwen vaak spullen die bijdragen aan de vervulling van de vrouwelijke rol (bijvoorbeeld cosmetica, sieraden, kleding). Bij mannen is steelgedrag (en ander crimineel gedrag) ook rolbevestigend, zij het dat mannen dat voornamelijk doen om uitdrukking te geven aan hun geslachtsrol door bijvoorbeeld lef te tonen of tegen autoriteiten te ageren (zoals het stelen van voor hen nutteloze voorwerpen of het vernielen van openbare objecten). Echter, mannen stelen ook uit bezitsdrang en ze passen daarbij zo nodig geweld toe. Hun steelgedrag en het geweld dat daarbij gebruikt wordt, zijn dan 'functioneel' om het doel te bereiken (zoals batterijen stelen voor de walkman, een willekeurig iemand beroven om aan geld te komen, een auto kraken voor de apparatuur; Franssens, 1996).

De geringe geweldscriminaliteit onder vrouwen wordt ook vanuit de roltheorie geduid. Zijn vrouwen betrokken bij vermogensdelicten die gepaard gaan met geweld, dan zijn zij vaak medeplichtig aan delicten van mannelijke hoofddaders en spelen zij een ondergeschikte rol bij de uitvoering ervan (Hoffman-Bustamente, 1973). Deze rol is in overeenstemming met de maatschappelijk rol die voor vrouwen is weggelegd. **Als vrouwen zelf geweld plegen, dan is dit gedrag ook gerelateerd aan hun relationele doelen: vrouwen richten hun agressieve daden voornamelijk op personen met wie ze een intieme relatie onderhouden. Volgens Franssens (1996) is het zelfs zo (bij meisjes) dat, áls die relatie er niet is met de figuur op wie het geweld is gericht, zij hun slachtoffer eerst tot een persoon 'maken' door in een mum van tijd een relatie met het slachtoffer aan te gaan. Pas daarna slaan ze toe. Het geweld is dan niet functioneel of instrumenteel (om een verder liggend doel te bereiken), maar het is gericht op het slachtoffer als persoon. Meisjesgeweld is ook bedoeld om de persoon in kwestie te raken, te kwetsen. Misschien ligt hier ook een verklaring voor het feit dat meisjes veel minder dan jongens geweld plegen op (openbare) voorwerpen. Het vernielen van openbare en dus anonieme zaken en ander vandalistisch gedrag, waarbij het motief voor de geweldpleging vaak neerkomt op 'baldadigheid', 'voor de lol' of'de kick', ligt, gegeven de persoonsgerichtheid van hun geweldsdelicten, bij meisjes niet voor de hand. Franssens (1996) stelt vast dat jongens die bij hun delicten geweld gebruiken tegen personen, geen relatie hebben met het slachtoffer en ook absoluut niet weten wie die persoon is. Zij hebben niet het slachtoffer, maar een ander doel voor ogen als ze toeslaan. Het slachtoffer is alleen maar een belemmering voor het bereiken van hun doel en dat obstakel moet dus uit de weg geruimd worden. De verschillende betekenisgeving van meisjes en jongens om het geweld 'zinvol' te doen zijn, sluit aan bij de opvatting van Morris (1964) dat meisjes voornamelijk 'relationele' doeleinden hebben en jongens 'status'-doeleinden.** Zij vond in een onderzoek ondersteuning voor de door haar geformuleerde hypothese dat meisjes eerder tot delinquentie overgaan als ze belemmerd worden in het onderhouden van positieve affectieve relaties, en dat bij jongens delinquentie eerder op zal treden als zich belemmeringen voordoen bij het nastreven van economische statusdoeleinden. Delinquente meisjes hebben meer te lijden onder relationele problemen dan andere jongeren (niet-delinquente jongens en meisjes en delinquente jongens). Zij komen vaker uit gebroken gezinnen en gezinnen met grote spanningen. Franssens (1996) komt tot een gelijkaardige vaststelling als zij nagaat hoe verschillend preventief gehechte jongens en meisjes, die zij in het kader van een persoonlijkheidsonderzoek onderzocht, reageren op negatieve factoren in hun gezinssituatie. Meisjes zijn op grond van hun relatiegerichtheid gevoeliger voor bepaalde negatieve invloeden (risicofactoren) dan jongens, aldus Franssens. Jongens zullen vanuit hun activiteitgerichtheid dan weer een grotere gevoeligheid vertonen voor andere risicofactoren dan meisjes. Bij meisjes vond Franssens dat de (echtelijke) relatie van de ouders en de emotionele stabiliteit van de moeder opvallend vaak bepalend zijn voor de problematiek (en het criminele gedrag) van de dochter. In veel gevallen is Hoofdstuk 2 36 de vader letterlijk of figuurlijk afwezig in het gezin. De spanningen in het gezin, als gevolg van de emotionele labiliteit van de moeder, worden vervolgens volledig afgewenteld op het kind dat daar het meest gevoelig voor is; vaak blijkt dat de dochter te zijn.

 

 

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_Emancipatietheorie_

In het verlengde van de roltheorie ligt de emancipatiehypothese van Adler (1975). Zij veronderstelt dat veranderingen in het vrouwelijke rolpatroon ten gevolge van de emancipatiebeweging van vrouwen vanaf het einde van de jaren zestig, op hun beurt veranderingen teweegbrengen in de omvang en de aard van vrouwencriminaliteit. Het vrouwelijke criminele gedrag gaat meer en meer op dat van mannen lijken. Vrouwen komen door hun groeiende aandeel in de werkende bevolking meer in de gelegenheid om (vooral witteboorden) criminaliteit te plegen. Volgens Adler hebben vrouwen zich door een veranderd rolpatroon de statusdoeleinden van mannen eigen gemaakt en zullen zij, bij gebrek aan legitieme middelen om deze te bereiken, naar illegitieme mogelijkheden grijpen. Deze zogenaamde masculinisering van het vrouwelijke gedrag zal voortduren totdat er een volledige sociale en economische gelijkheid tussen de seksen is bereikt. In Nederland is geconstateerd dat de (geregistreerde) criminaliteit in haar totaliteit sinds het einde van de jaren zestig tot medio jaren tachtig is toegenomen en dat in die periode uitgerekend steeds meer mannen zowel in absolute als in relatieve zin verdacht worden van (winkel)diefstal (Van der Heijden, 1987). De totale omvang van de criminaliteit vertoont sinds 1985 geen belangrijke stijging; in 1985 treedt een stabilisering op (Junger-Tas en Kester, 1994; Junger-Tas, 1995; Grapendaal e.a., 1997). **De ontwikkeling van meisjes- en vrouwencriminaliteit verschilt hiervan, stelt Junger-Tas (1995): vrouwencriminaliteit neemt al zo'n vijftien jaar toe en die stijging is sterker dan bij jongens en mannen. Toename van bekend geworden vermogenscriminaliteit onder vrouwen in de Verenigde Staten heeft volgens Steffensmeier (1981) niet zozeer met emancipatie te maken maar veeleer met de verslechterde sociaal-economische omstandigheden op basis van gender12 en klasse. Alleenstaande moeders met een bijstandsuitkering hebben het meest te lijden onder de economische recessie** (Box en Hale, 1983; Box, 1987). Daarnaast is de gelegenheid tot diefstal en fraude vergroot (grote zelfbedieningszaken, kredietkaarten en cheques), maar is ook de pakkans toegenomen (betere winkelbeveiliging, grotere bereidheid tot aangifte en vervolging).

 

 

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_NOOT_

 

 

 

> 12 Het begrip gender heeft betrekking op de sociale en culturele bepaling van het biologische gegeven wat met sekse of geslacht wordt aangeduid. Cairns en Kroll (1994) definiëren gender als die psychologische kenmerken, attitudes en overtuigingen waarvan aangenomen wordt dat ze verschillend zijn bij mannen en vrouwen. Geslacht kan vastgesteld worden door de personen zelf, door anderen of door middel van objectieve biologische metingen.
> 
>  

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_Controletheorie_

De vraag die Hirschi met zijn algemene 'control'-theorie poogt te beantwoorden, is niet zozeer waarom jongeren de wet overtreden, maar waarom zoveel jongeren dat niet doen. De verklaring die hij geeft, is dat jongeren afzien van regelovertredend gedrag vanwege de bindingen die ze hebben met anderen in hun omgeving en met de conventionele samenleving als geheel. Deze sociale bindingen hebben met andere woorden een criminaliteitsremmende werking. Er worden vier bindingselementen onderscheiden: gehechtheid aan anderen (de emotionele binding met de samenleving), betrokkenheid (de rationele binding), gebondenheid (de mate waarin iemand zich bezighoudt met conventionele activiteiten) en overtuigingen (de mate waarin iemand gelooft de gemeenschapsregels te moeten gehoorzamen; Bruinsma en Lissenberg, 1987). **Jeugdcriminaliteit is volgens de Commissie-Roethof een (ongewenst) bijverschijnsel van de toenemende welvaart. De sterke stijging van de kleine en veel voorkomende criminaliteit sinds 1960 wordt veroorzaakt door de toegenomen gelegenheid die er met de welvaart kwam. Daarnaast wijst zij op het wegvallen van allerlei vormen van informele sociale controle, waardoor de gelegenheid tot het plegen van delicten nog verder is vergroot.**

Er zijn diverse betekenissen aan het begrip 'control' gegeven. In de geest van Hirschi's theorie betekent control zelfbeheersing of interne controle. In latere Nederlandse toepassingen van deze theorie is het vertaalde begrip 'sociale controle' een eigen leven gaan leiden en zijn er verschillende betekenissen gebruikt op verschillende definitieniveaus (Bouw e.a., 1988). De theorie is onder meer gebruikt om de geringe meisjescriminaliteit te verklaren. **Meisjes zouden enerzijds sterkere affectieve bindingen hebben met hun ouders dan jongens (onder andere Rutenfrans, 1983) en anderzijds zouden zij, zowel informeel als formeel, sterker gecontroleerd worden (onder andere Junger-Tas, 1983 en 1985; Kok, 1983; Graham en Bowling, 1995). Over de houdbaarheid van de eerste bewering - de veronderstelde verschillen in gehechtheid tussen jongens en meisjes - bestaan twijfels.** Uit een aantal onderzoeken komt naar voren dat meisjes zich niet of nauwelijks sterker hechten aan hun ouders (Simmons e.a., 1980; Bruinsma, 1985). Armsden en Greenberg (zie Marcus, 1996, p. 147) daarentegen vonden wel degelijk verschillen in gehechtheid aan ouders en leeftijdgenoten tussen meisjes en jongens, waarbij meisjes zich sterker blijken te hechten. Schoenberg (zie Johnson, 1979; p. 123) en Johnson (1979) vinden echter aanwijzingen dat de samenhang tussen delinquentie en gehechtheid aan de ouders bij jongens groter is dan bij meisjes. Johnson concludeerde dat gehechtheid aan de school meer samenhang vertoont met meisjes- dan met jongenscriminaliteit. Andere auteurs komen dan weer tot de slotsom dat de binding met de school even belangrijk is voor jongens als voor meisjes (Figuera-McDonough, 1987; Krohn en Massey, 1980). Het is evenwel denkbaar dat jongens hun emotionele binding met de ouders anders uiten dan meisjes, waardoor de indruk kan ontstaan dat jongens zich in mindere mate hechten aan hun ouders (Bruinsma en Lissenberg, 1987). Ook Franssens (1996) waarschuwt ervoor om verschillen in presentatie tussen jongens en meisjes niet te verwarren met aanwezig geachte fundamentele verschillen tussen jongens en meisjes. **De tweede bewering - meisjes worden sterker gecontroleerd dan jongens - wordt door onderzoek onderschreven.** **Zo concludeert Nye (1958) dat de controlerende rol van de ouders meer voor meisjes dan voor jongens opgaat.** Uit onderzoeken waarin naar de informele controlepraktijken van ouders gevraagd is, komt naar voren dat zowel voor meisjes als voor jongens de bewegingsvrijheid vanaf de jaren zestig sterk is toegenomen en dat jongeren zich steeds meer aan de informele ouderlijke controle weten te onttrekken ()enger-Tas, 1995). Zo is het uitgaansgedrag van meisjes vergelijkbaar met dat van jongens als het gaat om het gezelschap: meisjes gaan in even grote mate als jongens in groepsverband of met een goede vriend(in) uit. Toch stelt Junger-Tas dat er nog steeds aanwijsbare verschillen zijn in ouderlijke controle en bewegingsvrijheid van meisjes en jongens, hoewel deze verschillen wel kleiner zijn geworden. Onderzoek naar de leefwerelden wijst in dezelfde richting: meisjes krijgen van huis uit veel meer beperkingen opgelegd in hun doen en laten (De Waal, 1989).

De algemene verklaringskracht op het individuele niveau van de sociale-controletheorie is inmiddels wel gerelativeerd (Nijboer, 1995). De verschillen in regelovertredend gedrag tussen de seksen, tussen etnische groepen en tussen sociale klassen kunnen met deze theorie niet overtuigend verklaard worden. De theorie kan evenmin voor alle vormen van criminaliteit een verklaring bieden; ze lijkt vooral op te gaan voor de minder ernstige vormen ervan en voor licht delinquente groepen (Leeuw e.a., 1987). Deze theorie biedt geen sluitende verklaring voor de persisterende delictplegers, de vroegdelinquenten en de drugscriminelen. Uit onderzoek is gebleken dat reeds op zeer jonge leeftijd verschillen voorkomen tussen latere delictplegers en niet-plegers (onder andere Moffit, 1993). Een ander bezwaar tegen Hirschi's theorie is dat sociale controle allerlei vormen kan aannemen, zoals de dwang van leeftijdgenoten ('peers') in de richting van regelovertredend gedrag (Bouw, 1991).

 

 

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_Vriendschapsrelaties en beïnvloeding door peers_

Ruth Morris stelde reeds in 1966 vast dat de houding van delinquente jongens en meisjes en hun respectievelijke vrienden tegenover delinquent gedrag verdraagzamer is dan die van niet-delinquente jongens en meisjes en hun vrienden. Meisjes blijken zich wel meer te schamen voor hun delinquent gedrag dan jongens, mogelijk omdat ze hun reputatie niet willen schaden. **Er is volgens Morris ook sprake van een algemene tendens van geringere tolerantie ten opzichte van meisjes die delicten plegen in vergelijking tot jongens die dezelfde delicten begaan.** Morris besluit hieruit dat er relatief weinig (sub)culturele steun is voor delinquent gedrag van vrouwen en dat de afwezigheid van die steun waarschijnlijk een belangrijke verklarende factor is voor de geringe meisjescriminaliteit (Rutenfrans, 1989).

Giordano (1978) is echter van mening dat meisjes die zich crimineel gedragen, wel degelijk (subculturele) steun krijgen, namelijk van leeftijdgenoten. Zij ging na of de criminaliteitsbevorderende rol van de peergroep ook opgaat voor meisjes en vond dat de invloed van de vriendinnengroep bij meisjes even groot is als de invloed van de vriendengroep bij jongens. De goedkeuring van vriendinnen bleek statistisch significant gerelateerd te zijn aan het feitelijke criminele gedrag van de meisjes die Giordano en Cernkovich in 1977 ondervroegen in een niet-gepubliceerd onderzoek. **De onderzoeksresultaten van Simpson en Elis (1995) wijzen uit dat delinquent gedrag als bijproduct van het hebben van vrienden met weinig toekomstverwachtingen in het bijzonder voor blanke meisjes en zwarte jongens opgaat. Hoewel de belang- , rijkste referentiegroep - als bron van waardering en goedkeuring - voor meisjes de vriendinnengroep is, geven meisjes in laatstgenoemd onderzoek aan dat ze veelal in een gemengde groep vertoeven als ze delicten plegen. De mate waarin meisjes delicten in gemengd groepsverband plegen, varieerde enigszins naar type delict (vaker bij vandalisme en beroving, minder vaak bij eenvoudige diefstal) en naar ras (verhoudingsgewijs meer bij blanke dan bij zwarte meisjes).**

 

De stelling van Giordano luidt dat de alledaagse contacten van meisjes met jongens ingrijpende veranderingen ondergaan. Meisjes trekken met jongens op en dat gebeurt op een niet-romantische manier en in gemengde groepen. Zo komen meisjes meer dan voorheen in situaties terecht waarin ze criminele handelingen, waarbij een zekere technische kennis vereist is, van jongens kunnen leren en waarin ze ook (actief) betrokken raken bij criminele activiteiten. Giordano ziet in deze veranderingen in de alledaagse sociale context van meisjes een verklaring voor de kwantitatieve ontwikkeling en de toenemende veelzijdigheid van meisjescriminaliteit. Meisjes gaan wel vriendschappelijk met jongens om en zij doen klaarblijkelijk mee aan crimineel gedrag in groepsverband, maar het is niet helemaal duidelijk welke invloed jongens en meisjes in dergelijk groepsverband op elkaar uitoefenen (of het bijvoorbeeld jongens zijn die meisjes overhalen om mee te doen, of dat meisjes door vriendinnen aangezet worden tot crimineel gedrag). Uit het onderzoek van Giordano en Cernkovich blijkt wel dat meisjes het meest goedkeuring van hun vriendinnen verwachten als ze delicten plegen.

 

 

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_Power-controltheorie_

Hoewel de factoren klasse en gender in de meeste statistische analyses met delinquentie gecorreleerd zijn, hebben sociologische theorieën lange tijd geen raad geweten met de vraag hoe de relatie tussen gender en delinquentie eruitziet als gecontroleerd wordt voor sociale factoren als klasse. Hagan e.a. (1985) formuleren het als volgt:

 

> **Class apparently accounts too little delinquency (Hirschi, 1972); gender stubbornly accounts for too much (Steffensmeier, 1980)'.**

 

Hagan e.a. brachten vervolgens beide factoren samen in hun neomarxistische 'power-control'-theorie waarin zij het concept macht uit machtstheorieën van het macroniveau verbinden met de controletheorie die vooral betrekking heeft op het microniveau. In hun theorie zijn de aanwezigheid van macht en de afwezigheid van controle bepalend voor de condities waaronder jongeren van sociale voorschriften afwijken. **De vrijheid waarover jongeren beschikken om af te wijken van die voorschriften, is gerelateerd aan hun klassepositie.** Aangenomen wordt door Hagan e.a. dat jongens vrijer zijn om af te wijken van de norm dan meisjes en dat jongens de meeste vrijheid genieten in de hogere sociale klassen. **Zij bouwen voort op een stelling van Bonger dat de sterkte van de relatie tussen sekse en criminaliteit toeneemt naarmate de sociale klasse hoger is. Hoe lager de sociale klasse, hoe zwakker de relatie wordt.** De seksespecifieke uitoefening van informele sociale controle in het gezinsleven zou volgens deze auteurs bepalend zijn voor de afschrikkende werking van officiële sancties of althans de perceptie daarvan. De controle van ouders op hun kinderen varieert naar klasse en naar sekse van zowel de ouders als de kinderen. Moeders zouden meer dan vaders de ouderlijke controle uitoefenen en die controle zou meer op dochters dan op zonen worden toegepast. Meisjes wordt geleerd (altijd) risico's te mijden en in het bijzonder officiële sancties te voorkomen. Volgens deze auteurs worden meisjes meer dan jongens afgeschrikt door de dreiging van officiële sancties en dit verschil is meer gelegen in de moederlijke dan in de vaderlijke controle. In hun empirisch onderzoek vonden zij bevestiging voor hun stelling dat de combinatie van veel macht en weinig controle de conditie schept waaronder criminaliteit kan ontstaan. Deze conditie valt jongens in de hoogste sociale klasse ten deel; meisjes in dezelfde klasse ondervinden veel meer controle en hebben bijgevolg minder ruimte om af te wijken van de regels. 

 

 

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(p.48)


	3. ON WRITING: 2. NIETSZCHE EN HET APPOLONISCHE EN DIONYSISCHE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uit: _De geboorte van de tragedie_ Door Nietzsche  
> Uittreksel Wim Verbeeck: https://docplayer.nl/8897759-Friedrich-nietzsche-de-geboorte-van-de-tragedie-1-een-studie.html

 

UITTREKSEL WIM VERBEECK

 

 

 

_3\. Het dionysische en apollinische als antwoorden op de menselijke existentie_

Naast de aangename momenten confronteert het bestaan de mens niet zelden met moeilijke situaties. Omdat het leven geen pauzeknop kent, dient de mens, flexibel als hij is, onmiddellijk klaar te staan met antwoorden of ten minste deelantwoorden om terug aan de slag te kunnen gaan.

In  _De Geboorte van de tragedie_ presenteert Nietzsche drie zulke antwoorden:   **het   dionysische,   het   apollinische   en   het Socratische**.  Het  is  een  misvatting  te  denken  dat  Nietzsche  gelooft  dat  de  lijst  van antwoorden  volledig  is,  noch  spreekt  hij  een  waardeoordeel  uit  over  elk  van  de antwoorden  op  zich.  Wel  gelooft  hij  dat  het  samengaan  van  het  dionysische  en  het apollinische resulteert in een uniek antwoord, de Griekse tragedie. Dit antwoord is zo uniek en van zo’n grote waarde dat het de waarde van de Griekse oudheid voor alle volgende generaties veiligstelt. Hoewel  Nietzsche  zijn  betoog  over  het  dionysische  en  het  apollinische  start vanuit  de  esthetica,  dient  men  voor  ogen  te  houden dat  in  de  Griekse  oudheid disciplines  als  de  esthetica,  de  kunst  en  de  religie,  veel  minder  gescheiden  waren dan  men  op  het  eerste gezicht zou  kunnen  denken. In  zekere  zin  zou  men  de segmentering   van   deze   disciplines   kunnen   aanzien   als   een   retrospectief   en interpretatief  kijken.  Nietzsche  confronteert  de  lezer  al  snel  met  een  classificatie  en een  analogie  wanneer  hij  stelt dat  de  kunst  van  de  oude  Grieken  kan  worden onderverdeeld in een beeldende kunst, gekoppeld aan Apollo en een niet-beeldende kunst,  gekoppeld  aan  Dionysus  (Nietzsche,  2009:21).

De  Griekse  tragedie  ontstaat volgens Nietzsche ‘door een wonderbaarlijke krachtinspanning van de Helleense ‘wil’ ‘(Nietzsche, 2009:21). Nietzsche geeft hier weinig uitleg over wat er juist onder deze wil kan worden verstaan. Misschien heeft hij het over de wil zoals Schopenhauer die opvat,  of  misschien  kan  je  de  wil  al  was  het  maar  ten  dele  vervangen  door  de verbeelding. **Gregory B. Sadler beaamt in een reactie op een vraag van mij via mail dat de verbeelding inderdaad de plaats is waar de ontmoeting tussen het dionysische en   het   apollinische   plaatsvindt,   maar,   zo   waarschuwt   hij,   niet   alleen   in   de verbeelding.** Hij schrijft: ‘ _Now,  the  encounter?  Certainly  it  is  occurring  through  the imagination --though  not  necessarily in  the  imagination,  certainly  not  in  it  alone, since it is also just as much a clash of affectivity._ ’ (Sadler, 2013). **Aan het dionysische en het apollinische worden volgens Nietzsche eveneens twee  specifieke  bewustzijnstoestanden  gekoppeld,  respectievelijk  de  roes  en  de droom.**

 

* * *

 

De tijd lijkt me nu rijp om even stil te staan bij voornoemde kernbegrippen en bouwstenen van de Griekse tragedie, te beginnen met het apollinische. Apollo is  een  erg  belangrijke  Griekse  god  met  uiteenlopende  bevoegdheden die  anderen  met  meer  deskundigheid  kunnen  verwoorden  dan  ik.  Voor  ons  telt  de associatie  tussen  Apollo  en  de  droom. Nietzsche spreekt over de ‘schijnende’ god, de god van het licht, van de schone schijn en de innerlijke fantasiewereld (Nietzsche, 2009:23).  Sadler geeft  in  zijn  video  een  interessante  beschouwing  over  de  droom(Sadler, 2013). Elke mens heeft zijn kwaliteiten en beperkingen. In de droom zijn we echter in staat om deze kwaliteiten uit te breiden en de beperkingen op te heffen. Zo kunnen  we  in  onze  dromen  allemaal  een  briljant  muzikant  zijn,  terwijl  we  dat  in  het dagelijks  leven  misschien  helemaal  niet  zijn.  De  droom  dient  om  onze  dagelijkse gebeurtenissen  te  verwerken  en  te  herbeleven.  Hierin  kent  de  droom  een  erg interessante  eigenschap.  We  zijn  immers  in  staat  om  de  droom  af  te  bakenen  en letterlijk  te  relativeren  door  onszelf  gerust  te  stellen  dat  het  maar  een  droom  was. **Nietzsche wijst erop dat in de droom het leven optreedt in al zijn facetten, zowel de positieve  als  de  negatieve.  Erg  belangrijk is  dat  de  droom,  en  dus  ook  het apollinische,  door  Nietzsche  gekoppeld  wordt  aan  het  zogenaamde principium individuationis, door Hans Driessen omschreven als ‘het beginsel krachtens welke de ene oergrond van de wereld in de veelheid van verschijnselen uiteenvalt’ (Driessen, 2009:150).De  droom  kan  dus  enerzijds  geassocieerd  worden  met  verbeelding  en verwerking, en anderzijds met afbakening, limitering en het besef dat we een individu zijn dat zich onderscheidt van andere individuen.** **Doinysos  of  Bacchus  was  oorspronkelijk  de  god  van  de  wijn.  Nietzsche koppelt  aan  Dionysus  eveneens  de  geestestoestand  van  de  roes  of  de  extase,  al beweert  Von  Reibnitz  dat  deze  associatie  in  de  geschiedenis  niet  vanzelfsprekend was (Von Reibnitz, 1992:80)**. Uit de studie van Von Reibnitz blijkt dat Nietzsche het oorspronkelijke  dionysische  kunstbegrip  ‘gepsychologiseerd’  heeft,   zeker   in   de associatie met de roes(Von Reibnitz, 1992:90). **Hij maakt van Dionysus de god van het  uitbundige  leven  om  deze  in  de  strijd  te  gooien  tegen  de christelijke  god(Von Reibnitz,  1992:83). Was  Apollo  de  leverancier  van  het principium  individuationis,**

Dionysus verwijst  naar  de  eenheid,  de  natuur  in  haar  overvloed  en  uitbundigheid. Dionysus  is  de  god  van  de  dans,  de  muziek,  de  roes  en  de  intoxicatie. T **och  is  het dionysische geen blinde, hedonistische kracht. Nietzsche schrijft: ‘Wanneer we bij dit afgrijzen    [i.e.   het   afgrijzen    van    de   mens    naar    aanleiding    van    bepaalde bestaanservaringen] de  gelukzalige  geestesvervoeringbetrekken  die  ten  gevolge van datzelfde teloorgang  van het principium individuationis uit de diepste grond van de mens, om niet te zeggen van de natuur, opwelt, dan wordt ons een blik gegund in het  wezen  van  het Dionysische,  dat  we  nog  het  best  kunnen  omschrijven  met  het woord roes**. Kortom,  het  apollinische confronteert  de  mens  via  het principium  individuationis met  zijn  individualiteit  en concrete  existentie,  terwijl  het  dionysische  als  gevolg  van  het  afgrijzen  de  mens terugvoert naar zijn collectieve identiteit als mens onder de mensen. Het samengaan van  deze  psychologische  en  fysiologische  toestanden  resulteert in  de  Griekse tragedie, zoals gezegd door Nietzsche aangeduid als het belangrijkste moment in de Griekse geschiedenis. Hij schrijft: ‘Deze verzoening is het belangrijkste moment in de geschiedenis van de Griekse cultus: waar men ook kijkt, overal zijn de revolutionaire gevolgen van deze gebeurtenis zichtbaar8’ (Nietzsche, 2009:28).

 

* * *

 

 

> **‘In dit licht bezien moeten we de Griekse tragedie opvatten als het Dionysische koor dat zich telkens opnieuw in een Apollinische beeldenwereld ontlaadt’ (Nietzsche, 2009:57)**

Nietzsche verdedigt de controversiële stelling dat de Griekse tragedie oorspronkelijk vanuit het koor is ontstaan. Meer nog, hij voegt er aan toe dat de Griekse tragedie oorspronkelijk alleen maar koor was: ‘Deze overlevering laat er geen misverstand over bestaan dat de tragedie uit het tragische koor ontstaan is en oorspronkelijk alleen maar koor was en niets dan koor […]13’ (cursivering: Nietzsche) (Nietzsche, 2009:47). Uit deze beschouwing volgt dat het koor zowel een dionysisch als een Apollinisch facet dient te hebben, daar de tragedie volgens Nietzsche per definitie ontstaat uit het samenklinken van voornoemde bewustzijnstoestanden. Tevens volgt hieruit de cruciale rol van de muziek. Indien het koor oorspronkelijk de tragedie was, dan volgt hieruit, gegeven dat het koor zingt, dat de muziek ahw het medium bij uitstek is waarin de tragedie vorm krijgt. **Nietzsche gelooft in Dionysische muziek als een soort van arché die in staat is de wereld te herhalen. Met andere woorden gaat de muziek het denken in zekere zin vooraf (Nietzsche, 2009:39).** Nietzsche schrijft:

> Als Dionysische kunstenaar is hij [lyricus] eerst en vooral volstrekt één geworden met het oer-ene, met al zijn smarten en tegenspraken; vervolgens geeft hij dit oerene weer in de vorm van muziek, tenminste als men deze terecht als herhaling van de wereld en als tweede afgietsel bestempeld heeft; dan echter wordt deze muziek weer als in een metaforisch droombeeld, onder invloed van de Apollinische droomwereld voor hem zichtbaar15’ (cursivering: Nietzsche) (Nietzsche, 2009:39).

Dit ingewikkelde citaat bevat erg veel informatie waar we enkel zicht op zullen krijgen wanneer we stap voor stap gaan redeneren. Het blijft echter wezenlijk belangrijk om voor ogen te houden dat de muziek volgens Nietzsche het medium is waarin de Helleense wil verschijnt, verantwoordelijk voor het samenkomen van het Dionysische en het Apollinische (Nietzsche, 2009:46). **Tot hiertoe weze duidelijk dat de muziek een cruciale rol speelt doordat ze de stem vormt van het koor, i.e. de oorspronkelijke tragedie en omdat ze de merkwaardige gave van de herhaling van de wereld bezit.**

In eerste instantie brengt het koor een (Dionysisch) visioen voort dat door de acteurs op het podium wordt gepersonifieerd (Nietzsche, 2009:58). Het Dionysische kan zich met andere woorden niet anders uiten dan door acteurs, die Apollinisch zijn. Belangrijk is echter dat de acteur in deze geen rol speelt, maar een identiteitsverandering ondergaat. De acteur is Dionysus in alle mogelijke gedaanten: ‘Het koor der Oceaniden meent werkelijk de titaan Prometheus voor zich te zien, en beschouwt zichzelf als net zo reëel als de god op het podium’ (Nietzsche, 2009:49) en (2009:66-67). **Omdat het Dionysische een onhanteerbare realiteit is, vanwege de aard van het Dionysische zelf, wordt het ahw gekanaliseerd in het acteerwerk op het podium en teruggestuurd naar het koor, waar het wordt opgevangen door de Sater, die, ook vanuit zijn natuur, een personificatie is van Dionysische en Apollinische krachten. Het koor vervult hier een levende muur tegen de aanstormende werkelijkheid, analoog met de functie van de olympische goden.**


	4. ON WRITING: 3. WONG KAR-WAI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.jstor.org/stable/44019075?read-now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli in

 _FILM CRITICISM  
_Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 2000-01)

 

* * *

 

 

 

_Cinematic connections_

The most obvious sign of the prominence of time in Wong Kar-Wai's films is their titles. Some titles emphasize the temporal, transitory aspect of events,  _As Tears Go By_ and  _Days of Being Wild_. Others stress speed, as in  _Chungking Express_ , or simply include the word "time", as in  _Ashes of Time_. Wong Kar-Wai's films also feature an abundance of watches, clocks, and calendars, not only as part of the design but also as important elements of the narrative and symbolism of his films. The characters often look at the watches and calendars and comment on the time. In  _Days of Being Wild_ we see a woman carefully cleaning a large clock, which literally shows the importance of time. In addition, the director includes objects that move in a rhythmical way, reminiscent of clocks and sang-glasses, such as juke boxes in  _Chungking Express_ and  _Fallen Angels_ , a moving cage in  _Ashes of Time_ , or a lantern in  _Happy Together_.

In the emphasis he puts on the issue of time Wong Kar-Wai has a number of antecedents in world cinema. One of them is Jean-Luc Godard, another Alain Resnais, both regarded as key representatives of cinematic modernism. (...) Critics also praise Wong Kar-Wai for his ability to catch the spirit of time. Thus, for example,  _Happy Together_ conveys the atmosphere of the end of the millenium and the period when Hong Kong returned to China. **Most of the films, as Larry Gross observes in his sensitive analysis, are "inventories of the street life and culture of contemporary Hong Kong" (6).**

In contrast to Godard, who is first of all a sociologist, fascinated by what happens to groups of people in a particular period, Wong Kar-Wai is primarily a psychologist of time. His main interest lies in depicting people's perception of time and its significance in their lives, which is a matter of much less concern for Godard. On the other hand, the emphasis that Wong Kar-Wai puts on **subjective time or, more precisely, time as a subjective experience,** brings him closer to Alain Resnais, director of  _Hiroshima, mon amour_ (1959),  _L'anée dernièr à Marienbad_ ( _Last Year in Marienbad_ , 1961) and  _Providence_ (1977). However, Resnais' protagonists are overburdened by their often traumatic recollections and their memory is a creative force, shaping their present lives (Ward 14-16), while for Wong Kar-Wai's heroes, as we will try to demonstrate, the past and the memory matter very little. Instead, they live in the present.

 

 

-

 

 

_"throw-away society"_

(...) Sometimes this is a consequence of having little money, but more often it appears to be a deliberate choice rather than a necessity. They possess few material possessions or mementos from their childhood. Even if they do possess something of value, they part with it without regret.

 

> **The cop in _Chungking Express_ notices that the shape of the soap has changed and a fluffy mascot has a different color and size, but he seems to assume that this is natural: things, like people, simply change all the time**

[ _Specifiek relevant in relatie tot het veranderende lichaam van Salomé dat langzaam maar zeker in elk ander zwart vrouwenlichaam zou kunnen veranderen. Ze is iedereen want iedereen is_ " **interchangeable** " _waardoor het een kwestie van bluf en stilte wordt of je de gang van zaken interrumpeert of juist voort laat vloeien zoals de codes dicteren]_ ]

 

Belonging to a "throw-away society", according to Toffler, is a characteristic of a wider and multi-faceted phenomenon, "The Age of Transcience" in which nothing is permanent, everything is in the process of change (43). Accordingly, not only do the heroes of Wong Kar-Wai's films dispose of their belongings painlessly, but effortlessly change their jobs, houses, even countries. (...) Those who live in Hong Kong are rarely born there, coming from Macao, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, or mainland China (as did the director himself, who was born in Shanghai), or else their parents were immigrants. They typically do not bring with them anything from their old places, their luggage being always literally and metaphorically very light; **the children of the immigrants have no knowledge of their parents' countries.**

 

 

-

 

 

_Boredom_

(...) However, it is difficult to say if their unwillingness to become involved in a stable relationship results from their risky and unstable occupations or if they choose such jobs to avoid stable relationships.

The fear of boredom often hides the fear of looking under the surface, of discovering the true identity of the beloved and perhaps finding only emptiness. The motif of the dominance of surface over substance is typical of postmodernism, epitomized in postmodern art by such forms as pop video or advertising (Eagleton 385-387).

 

Another consequence of the constant changing of places and relationships is isolation. The way Wong Kar-Wai endows all his main characters with a voice-over, creating an inner monologue, strengthens the impression that his characters are trapped in their separate microcosms.

 

 

-

 

 

_Time_

(...) The phenomenon of replacing "meaningful time" with "raw time" (typically connected with the advancement of technology) has been noticed by many theorists of the postmodern condition, including Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, Alvin Toffler and Paul Virilio. It strongly affects the temporal hierarchy, undermining the importance of the past and future and increasing the significance of the present. **Paul Virilio claims that "the new technological time has no relation to any calendar or events nor to any collective memory. It is pure computer time, and as such helps construct a permanent present" (Virilio 15).**

(...)

 

> **More generally, Wong Kar Wai's characters' preoccupation with time shown on clocks and calendars paradoxically reveals the director's conviction in the diminishing significance of time as a dimension of human experience.**

 

-

 

 

_Lightness of being_

Although superficially different -Yuddi is rich and glamorous, while his lover Su Lizhen is poor and shy- the two characters of  _Days of Being Wild_ have one imprtant thing in common: they both have problems with their personal histories. Yuddi does not know his real parents; his rich mother abandoned him when he was a baby, leaving him to be brought up by an ex-courtesan. The mother, who lived in te Philippines, did not keep in contact with her son except to send money for his maintenance, and Yuddi's foster mother did not tell him about the woman who brought him into the world, pretending that she was his biological mother. Su Lizhen is an immigrant from Macao. She complains that Hong Kong was never a motherland for her, that she always felt a stranger in the vast city. Her job as a barwoman and ticket seller is demeaning and boring, she has no friends or family in Hong Kong (...). **Moreover, she can not even be nostalgic for Macao, as she does not have any ties with her old family and did not like her old country either.**

[ _Dit is ontzettend belangrijk. Ook Salomé kan het zich niet veroorloven om nostalgisch te zijn. Ze heeft één beeld van Kameroen en dat is het beeld van het huis van tante Céleste, waar ze zich belachelijk en niet vrouwelijk genoeg voelde, niet heel genoeg, en een vooroordeel ontwikkelde voor de mensen uit het moederland van haar vader. Ook haar Zeeuwse afkomst betekent niets voor haar. Het feit dat haar ouders beiden opnieuw wilden beginnen op een nieuwe plek en haar eigen verafschuwing/trauma door die plek maakt haar een vrouw die "zonder geschiedenis wilde zijn" maar daardoor ook nergens naar terug kon verlangen. Terugverlangen naar iets blijkt voor haar echter de kern te zijn van vooruit kunnen: zonder een verleden waartoe je je kunt verhouden, kan er niet over een volwaardige toekomst nagedacht worden. Er is alleen het nu, maar het nu is arbitrair en vervangbaar: elke keuze is consequentieloos want ze is iedereen en hierdoor niemand en niemand behoort tot het heden toe, kan alleen in de toekomst iemand worden -- > actie of wachten is de vraag? Prosperity Gospel retoriek_]

Both Su Lizhen and Yuddi attempt to overcome their lack of roots. (...) [Yuddi's] opinion [about the metaphor of the legless bird] can be identified with that of Wong Kar-Wai:

 

> **The dream of living always in the present is impossible to fulfill. Those who try to fly all their lives are even more entrapped than those who manage to settle down**

 


	5. AANTEKENINGEN

**IK WIL OVER EEN BLOEM SCHRIJVEN DIE IK NOG NOOIT HEB GEZIEN**

 

(onderwaterpoëzie maken)

Schermutselingen aan de C-V grens

_I don't wanna be a bitch about it but I'm gonna be a bitch about it_

Samen met Dionysos of áls Dionysos onder water duiken en daar als verloren dochter der natuur dansend en zingend terugkeren tot de Atlandis en de zee en al de verloren voorvaderen/de dode homies

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

> _Ik wil geen vrouw zijn met geschiedenis en doelen. Ik ben liever een gebied, zoals dat Arno zijn gedichten zones wil laten zijn. Geen personage maar een spreuk. Sigaretten roken met het The Paris Review interview met Toni Morrison. Ik zit met Meursault op haar veranda, een houten huis in Ohio. We roken sigaretten uit haar koker, trekken koffie uit de automaat in haar schrijfvertrek. In de cel zit hij vaak uit het raam te staren. Ik ga een stap verder en kijk slechts naar de muur._
> 
> _Samen verdwijnen we de zon in. Zijn hoofd richting het heetste vuur, ik duikend in het licht. Ik word door eenhoorns begeleid richting de Moeder der Verblinding. De kamelentocht van brandende, smeltende massa begint met Meursault en ik voorop._

 

 

Meursault en ik reizen, onderweg, klein beetje maar de verhuizing van de moeder, episodischer misschien, de taal moet zijn zoals de beelden in WKW-films. De backdrop is vol en bewegend, geurend, grillig. De giganten lopen als wachtend onheil op de achtergrond om het boek eraan te herinneren: het nu houdt ooit ook op. Het nu is een illusie. Het nu is niets dan een orkaan van geesten.

Zo past Timothy er ook in: hij is een passant, het maakt niet uit of hij wel of niet echt is want hij zal ook weer verdwijnen.

Zo schrijf ik ook de Prosperity Gospel van het jeugddetentiecentrum. 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Ik heb iets met de Peinzende Schrijver, Oscar Wilde die met een gebroken hart  _The Profundis_ schreef, uit zijn celraam over de wereld uitkijkend. Een God die het glas wegdenkt. Wat is er Europeser dan de geesten van zwarte mensen die met een welvarend doch depressief persoon door de wereld heen waaien?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

> Ik neem je mee naar de slavernijherdenking. Ik zat de ogen uit mijn kop te janken toen het plengoffer door de man werd gebracht, voor het oog van veel te weinig op een pleintje in Middelburg. Ik schaamde me kapot. Later werd ik door Surinaamse vrouwen omhelst en in Sranantongo toegesproken en moest ik uitleggen dat het niet zo zat.
> 
> Meursault, we kunnen nog meer drinken. We kunnen doorgaan tot er niet meer door te gaan valt en tussen het afval, de ratten belanden, tussen de naalden van de groep skatende jongens op het plein, die door hun 25jarige leider aan de heroïne zijn geraakt, sinaasappelen uit appartementen met open ramen stelen, honden opensnijden en hun harten eten om te proeven hoe het smaakt. We kunnen alles doen: vechten, je mag mij zo hard slaan als je wilt. Ik heb het verdiend, ik heb ook wel eens zo hard geslagen als ik wilde, ik ben daardoor immers hier beland. Ik heb veel nagedacht over je netelige positie. Je had kunnen acteren, maar waarvoor, voor wie? Ik begrijp wel wat je hebt gedaan, niet zozeer waarom maar wel wat. Daad bij woord voegen en dan krachtig doorzetten richting het vlees, het hart, de donkerte van het leven, inderdaad. Ik vraag me alleen af of je hebt zelf ook hebt begrepen.

 

Uitbarsting in het revalidatiecentrum

Uitbarsting in huis

Uitbarsting in het veld tegen de twee jongens

Uitbarsting tegen vader in Berlijn

Daarna nooit meer

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Deze roman gaat over kijken, de verraderlijkheid van je eigen blik, de zelfdestructie na het wantrouwen. Het enige wat men kan geloven is het nu, maar het nu is dood, verdwijnt constant, doet beloftes maar lost niks in, vervliegt en lokt de mensen mee, mensen die te pletter zullen vallen. Ik wantrouw. Ik geloof mijn ogen niet en heb ze eigenlijk nooit geloofd. Ik heb geleerd door andere ogen te kijken als ik waarheid nodig denk te hebben. Dus draai ik het om, dan ben ik een openstaand vat, geen geconcentreerde waarnemer. En wat is het dan dat ik registreer? Welke zaken vang ik op? Categoriseer de sensaties die in je worden opgeslagen. Sta stil in het heden en wordt je bewust van de tijd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

> Toen ik het masturberen begon te ontdekken dacht ik doorgaans nergens aan. Het gevoel, nu, hier, had de overhand. Ik dacht hoogstens aan mijzelf, mijn hand, mijn vinger, mijn schaamlippen, clitoris, stijve tepels, daar daar daar, ikikikikik. Ik wilde gewoon de prikjes voelen die over mijn lichaam liepen, lag me de hele avond te strelen. Ik was mijn eigen trofee. Toen ik hoorde dat mensen ook over anderen fantaseerden, over seksuele handelingen, suggestieve plaatjes, leek me dat dan ook raar. Ik begon alles wat me opwond te categoriseren, van porno tot rondborstige vrouwen, mannen van tv tot gestroomlijnde beelden die ik tijdens kunstgeschiedenis kreeg te zien. Soms dacht ik aan de heupen van tante Céleste. Toen kreeg ik die heupen zelf en was dat voorbij.
> 
> In de cel ben ik constant geil. Het is de verveling, de belofte van de dood die het leven toestaat. Het wachten, de binnengesmokkelde peuken, de hitte, de droge, bonzende lucht, alles schuurt over mijn lichaam, kolkt in mijn slome brein als de vibraties van een massagestoel, het water over een brede borstkas. De belofte van de dood is ook de herinnering, het moment herhalen van intens leven, een herhaling van een vervlogen nu. De belofte van de dood is de herinnering aan de nachttrein nemen naar Amsterdam, alle warmte van Studio 80 in 2006, niet doorhebben dat de dansende menigte niet bezeten door de Duivel is maar simpelweg stijf staat van de drugs. De beat is warm, de groep toeristen met hun vreemde tongen en dure t-shirts zijn warm, hoe ze met zijn vijven heen en weer op de bank bewegen warm, een groot vuurspuwend monster, zo krullerig likken de vlammen warm, zelfs de drankjes met hun klinkende ijsblokjes zijn warm, koud vuur en hete wodka. De vrouwenwc's met jongens zoenend in de hokjes is warm, over de deur van de hokjes kijken en niet verbaasd zijn dat er piemels uit broeken zijn getrokken is warm, de coke op de chromen kraan is warm, de club is warm als een dood deken.
> 
> De belofte van de dood is jou in een hoekje zien zitten, roken en grijnzen, want je weet dat het niet warm is. Je likt mijn oor en fluistert "Alles is chemisch, niets hieraan is echt" en de warmte is warm, schroeit de huid warm, het zweet, glotter en de chocolade op de tepels is warm, koude lepels op de tepels zijn ook warm, slagroom, pillen en bier op de tepels, Balenciaga op de tepels, nagels op de tepels, piercings door de tepels, schoenen op de tepels en tongen, neusgaten, oogballen op de tepels is warm en alle warmte zit in de golving van de lichamen, die imperfect en kleurrijk zijn, openstaan als dijken met grote gaten waar al het water door stroomt. De lichamen zijn de dijken en de dijken zijn de rondingen van Céleste en de heupen zijn gekookte honing, maar de honing is chemisch, alles hieraan is nep. Ik zal nooit een berg beklimmen, maar ik weet het toch al: het uizicht vanaf die berg? Ik heb 't al gezien, film, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, music videos drones. Ik kijk door de ogen van willekeurig medium naar de tepels, de warmte, de berg. Wat ik zie? Nep.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

> Het enige waar ik in de cel aan kon denken was niet hoeveel spijt ik had. Ik had wel spijt maar eerder omdat ik liever niet in de cel had gezeten. Nee, ik kon alleen maar denken aan hoe ik ze, als ik niet was gestopt, dood zou slaan, helemaal kapot, uit elkaar gerukt, kapotgehakt, met openbek in de koeienstront, penis afgerukt, boomtak rechtopstaand tussen de ingewanden, martel- en helsepijndood. En hoe veel vreugde me dat zou hebben gegeven, hoe tevreden ik erover zou zijn geweest, over hoe ik dat alles zou uitvoeren, al die brute acties die tot een grotesk kunstwerk van wraak zouden hebben geleid. Ik had heus  spijt van het hele gebeuren, maar voornamelijk wist ik dat het zo was gelopen, en niet anders, en dat het ook niet anders had kunnen lopen, omdat ik alleen maar was gestopt met slaan omdat ik niet wilde dat mijn familie last zou krijgen van dit alles. Dat vond ik veel belangrijker dan de cel, en de uren met de muur en Meursault die me gezelschap houdt door zo nu en dan, als ik me eenzaam voel en hem een vraag stel om zomaar iets te zeggen, met het ophalen van zijn schouders te antwoorden maar verder voornamelijk rook uitblaast in de luchtschacht en zijn bek houdt. Ik stopte met slaan omwille van de mogelijke media: de krant, de filmpjes, mijn Hyves-account dat vol zou stromen met berichtjes die ik er pas af zou kunnen halen als ik weer thuis was, mijn ouders' telefoon die non-stop zou rinkelen (ik moet nu ook denken aan mijn vader, die vertelde dat hij zijn nummer uit het telefoonboek had laten halen omdat hij belaagd werd met pesttelefoontjes omwille van zijn naam). Niet de schaamte maar het ongemak. Niet de spijt maar het gedoe. Niet de schuld maar de fantasie van de doorgezette daad. Ik had graag mijn daad voltooid, als ik geen familie had gehad had ik het ook gedaan. Misschien had Meursault nooit geschoten als zijn moeder nog had geleefd. Ik vraag het hem maar hij geeft geen antwoord. Zijn schouders zeggen slechts "Maar zo is het niet gelopen, dus...". Dus. 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

Huilen bij een foto van Nelson Mandela. Die tijden zijn voorbij, ze zijn voorbij.

God, de depressies, het verdriet, dat hing en hing maar rond in ons huis als een klootzak met knapzak. Al die mannen die denken God te zullen vinden door de drankfles te verslaan. Ik dans alsof mijn heupen niet aan mijn romp vastzitten. Ik drink hier mijn drankje, dáár, in de hoek, zijn mijn heupen rammelend aan het baren.

 

 

 

 

 

 

> _Ik ehb niet zoveel gedachte, gewoon de hele tijd dezelfde, als delen van erhalen die ik herlees. Soms, met genoeg toewijding en concentratie, lukt het me een bladzijde of twee om te slaan. Wat een chaos en revelatie zijn de volgende paar zinnen dan._
> 
>  
> 
>  

I realized that writing is a way of delaying the moment impossibility strikes. Zoals Joan Didion zegt: die tweede zin heeft al je mogelijkheden alweer vermoord.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

> _Who wants something real, when you could have nothing?_
> 
> _-_ Substance, Girls

 

Het lachen: (BAKHTIN) Het lachen met Guillermo van de groep terwijl ze elkaar slaan en kussen, terwijl hij haar ontmaagt en terwijl ze elkaar met de bal bekogelen. Het lachen en grijnzen naar elkaar en het blijven lachen en grijnzen tijdens de pijn, het plezier, de seks, de vernedering.


	6. ON WRITING: 4. OVER MEURSAULT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.jstor.org/stable/26302601?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents  
> https://sysprv.com/sartre_explication_stranger.html

_CAMUS'_ THE STRANGER _: THE SILENT SOCIETY AND THE ECSTACY OF RAGE_

Harry Slochower, Ph. D.,  
46 East 73rd St.,  
N.Y., N.Y. 10021

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Blinding whiteness is associated and intertwined with  _Silence_ which gives the pervasive tone to the novel, as it does in Kafka's works, especialle  _The Castle_. The silence of the events (shattered by Meursault towards the end) as at one with the silence or indifference of society -embodied in the mother- and makes all "strangers" and alone in their world.

Sartre:

 

 

 

> _The sentences...are islands. We bounce from sentence to sentence, from void to void. The sentences are not...arranged in relation to each other, they are simply juxtaposed...(they have)neither ramifications nor extensions nor internal structure...(are)all equal to each other, just as the absurd man's experiences are equal. Each one sets up for itself and sweeps the other into the void._

 

 

 

Meursault's non-involvement mirrors that of his society, incorporated by his mother (who is not given a first name). Indeed, Meursault's undigsuised indifference obliquely exposes the hypocrisy of a society which veils its lethargy by performing ritualistic acts, exposes the failure of a society to provide for a meaningful ques. Meursault's non-involvement is his "answer" to a society which does not care about him.

 

 

 **When Meursault fires at the Arab, he knew rhat he had "shattered the balance of the day".** His act is a step towards shattering the inertia of his life-analogous to liberating feeling Wright's Bigger Thomas experiences after he kills the white girl. And later in the scene, when Meursault assails the chaplain, he evinces the first genuine affect, "a sort of ecstacy of joy and rage.".

 

And he also finds that existentialist solace which Camus' Sisyphus draws from his enforced and vain labours:

 

 

 

> _Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into -just as it had got its teeth into me._

Meursault's life had been an anaesthisized existence, lived amidst an anaesthesized society. His shooting of the Arab and the attack on the chaplain mark the birth of his self, mark the conditions for the possibility that his aggression van be turned towards constructive individual and social pathways. Again, it is Camus' style which "tells" us this: It is only in these passages that Camus draws Meursault as coming alive. As an artist, Camus' "No" harbors a "Yes". **Even in his _Sisyphus_ , Camus urges that we must live "as if" the world had meaning. **

Affirmation is also expressed in Camus' life, in his work with the French Resistance against the Nazis. In "L'Homme Revolte" (1951), Camus writes that man affirms himself by rebelling: **"I rebel, therefore we are."**

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

As the title L'Etranger suggests, Meursault is a mysterious man. And in the preface to the American edition, when Camus states that he intended his hero to represent **,,le seul Christ que nous meritions"** , he only makes the nature of his hero more elusive 1. Critics have since found numerous parallels between the lives of these two figures. For example, both were given to frequenting undesirables and both were martyred because society considered them dangerous characters. Further similarities could easily be cited. Nonetheless, the idea of Meursault as a modern Christ remains rather startling.

 

What sort of personality is this? In _The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution_ , P. D. Ouspensky outlines a number of harmful habits which must be eliminated before the individual may progress down the path of metaphysical developmentL While, needless to say, no such list is definitive, Ouspensky's is particularly useful since it is at once succinct and representative of a broad spectrum of mystical teachings on the subject. **Ouspensky lists six key barriers to self-development. They are: lying, imagination, the expression of negative emotion, talking, identifying and considering (p. 39).** The meaning of some is self-evident. Others like imagination to which Ouspensky gives a particular definition require further clarification. **The following discussion will provide this and will also show that Meursault is remarkably free of the characteristics that cripple spiritual development. Let us take them one by one. First, lying. In his preface to the American edition, Camus underscores the fact that reluctance to lie is the central trait of Meursault's character. He refuses to pretend, to compromise and ,,jouer le jeu" as we all do to make life easier.** Camus defines lying as follows, ,,Mentir, ce n'est pas seulement dire ce qui n'est pas. C'est aussi, c'est surtout, dire plus que ce qui est et, en ce qui concerne le coeur humain, dire plus qu'on ne sent" (p. 1920). The classic example of Meursault's unbending truthfulness is, of course, his unwillingness to tell Marie he loves her. She would obviously like to hear him say all the traditional sweet nothings, although in her heart she would surely know he was being insincere. His frankness risks angering her, perhaps enough to break up the affair. But he refuses to take the easy way out and lie. Nor will he after his arrest pretend that he is sorry for his crime, clearly all that is necessary for him to avoid the death penalty and perhaps even get off with a relatively light sentence. But Meursault will fake neither romance nor repentence, even when, as in the latter case. he is called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice of his life in order to remain truthful.

Ouspensky defines lying not only as falsifying the truth but also as "speaking about things one does not know, and even cannot know, as though one knows, and can know" (p. 39). His definition comes uncannily close to Camus's. It brings to mind the chaplain who intrudes upon Meursault's last hours to harangue the condemned man about things of the spirit as if the cleric really knew what he was talking about, when in reality, as Meursault tells him, he knows nothing. Or the prosecutor whose version of the crime, although plausible on the surface, is nothing but a cleverly woven web of fraudulent misrepresentation. Of course, he is not overly concerned with the truth. He is playing the courtroom game and all he cares about is winning. He lies and wins his case; Meursault sticks to the truth and he is condemned to death. The contrast between these two men is not without irony. 

**Ouspensky's second habit is imagining. He does not use the term in the usual way to indicate a creative faculty. For him imagining is the way in which we kid ourselves, the source of our illusions about ourselves. It is a basically destructive faculty, the enemy of orderly, effective, accurate thought:**

 

 

> **_Imagination is almost as bad as lying; it is, in fact, lying to oneself. Man starts to imagine something in order to please himself, and very soon he begins to believe what he imagines, or at least some of it (p. 40)._**

 

 

 

 

 

 

# An Explication of The Stranger

## by Jean-Paul Sartre

 

> “An Explication of The Stranger.” (Originally titled “Camus’s The Outsider.”) First published in Situations I (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1947). From Literary and Philosophical Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York, 1955). Translated by Annette Michelson. Copyright 1955 by Criterion Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author, Librairie Gallimard, Rider & Co., and Criterion Books, Inc.

* * *

 

 

 

Camus’s  _The Stranger_  was barely off the press when it began to arouse the widest interest. People told each other that it was “the best book since the end of the war.” Amidst the literary productions of its time, this novel was, itself, a stranger. **It came to us from the other side of the Equator, from across the sea. In that bitter spring of the coal shortage, it spoke to us of the sun, not as of an exotic marvel, but with the weary familiarity of those who have had too much of it.** It was not concerned with re-burying the old regime with its own hands, nor with ﬁlling us with a sense of our own unworthiness.

 

In  _The Myth of Sisyphus,_  which appeared a few months later, Camus provided us with a precise commentary upon his work. His hero was neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. These categories "do not apply to him. He belongs to a very particular species for which the anther reserves the word “absurd.” But in Camus’s work this word takes on two very different meanings. The absurd is both a state of fact and the lucid awareness which certain people acquire of this state of fact. **The “absurd” man is the man who does not hesitate to draw the inevitable conclusions from a fundamental absurdity.**

Primary absurdity manifests a cleavage, the cleavage between man’s aspirations to unity and the insurmountable dualism of mind and nature, between man's drive toward the eternal and the  _ﬁnite_  character of his existence, between the “concern” which constitutes his very essence and the vanity of his efforts. Chance, death, the irreducible pluralism of life and of truth, the unintelligibility of the real—all these are extremes of the absurd.

 

 **The turn of his reasoning, the clarity of his ideas, the cut of his expository style and a certain kind of solar, ceremonious, and sad sombreness, all indicate a classic temperament, a man of the Mediterranean.** His very method (“only through a balance of evidence and lyricism shall we attain a combination of emotion and lucidity.”) recalls the old “passionate geometries” of Pascal and Rousseau and relate him, for example, not to a German phenomenologist or a Danish existentialist, but rather to Maurras, that other Mediterranean from whom, however, he differs in many respects.

But Camus would probably be willing to grant all this. To him, originality means pursuing one’s ideas to the limit; it certainly does not mean making a collection of pessimistic maxims. The absurd, to be sure, resides neither in man nor in the world, if you consider each separately. But since man's dominant characteristic is “being-in-the-world,” the absurd is, in the end, an inseparable part of the human condition. **Thus, the absurd is not, to begin with, _the object of a mere idea; it is revealed to us in a doleful illumination._ “Getting up, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, in the same routine”  _(Sisyphus),_  and then, suddenly, “the setting collapses,” and we ﬁnd ourselves in a state of hopeless lucidity.**

If we are able to refuse the misleading aid of religion or of existential philosophies, we then possess certain basic, obvious facts: the world is chaos, a “divine equivalence born of anarchy”; tomorrow does not exist, since we all die. **“In a universe suddenly deprived of light and illusions, man feels himself a stranger. This exile is irrevocable, since he has no memories of a lost homeland and no hope of a promised land.” The reason is that man is _not_  the world.**

 

> If I were a tree among other trees . . . this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would have none, for I would be part of this world. I would be this world against which I set myself with my entire mind. . . . It is preposterous reason which sets me against all creation.

**This explains, in part, the title of our novel; the stranger is man confronting the world.** Camus might as well have chosen the title of one of George Gissing’s works,  _Born in Exile_. The stranger is also man among men. “There are days when . . . you ﬁnd that the person you've loved has become a stranger.” The stranger is, ﬁnally, myself in relation to myself, that is, natural man in relation to mind: “The stranger who, at certain moments, confronts us in a mirror”  _(The Myth of Sisyphus)_.

 

“The ideal of the absurd man is the present and the succession of present moments before an ever-conscious spirit”  _(Sisyphus)_. Confronted with this “quantitative ethic” all values collapse; thrown into this world, the absurd man, rebellious and irresponsible, has “nothing to justify.” He is  _innocent_ (...)Innocent in every sense of the word, he, too, is, if you like, an “Idiot.”

And now we fully understand the title of Camus’s novel. **The stranger he wants to portray is precisely one of those terrible innocents who shock society by not accepting the rules of its game. He lives among outsiders, but to them, too, he is a stranger.**

 

 

 _The Stranger_  is not an explanatory book. T **he absurd man does not explain; he describes.** Nor is it a book which proves anything.

 

Although the absurdity of the human condition is its sole theme, it is not a novel with a message; it does not come out of a “satisﬁed” kind of thinking, intent on furnishing formal proofs. **It is rather the product of a thinking which is “limited, rebellious, and mortal.”**

 

The man who creates in absurdity has lost even the illusion of his work's necessity. He wants us, on the contrary, to be constantly aware of its contingent nature. He would like to see, inscribed below it, “might never have been,” as Gide wanted “could be continued” written at the end of  _The Counterfeiters_. This novel might not have been, like some stone or stream or face. It is a thing in the present that happens, quite simply, like all other happenings in the present. It has not even the subjective necessity that artists pretend to when, speaking of their works, they say, "I had to write it, I had to get it off my chest.” In it we ﬁnd one of the themes of surrealist terrorism sifted through the classic sun. **The work of art is only a leaf torn from a life. It does, of course, express this life. But it need not express it. And besides, everything has the same value, whether it be writing _The Possessed_  or drinking a cup of coffee.**

Camus does not require that attentive solicitude that writers who “have sacriﬁced their lives to art” demand of the reader,  _The Stranger_  is a leaf from his life. And since the most absurd life is that which is most sterile, his novel aims at being magniﬁcently sterile. **Art is an act of unnecessary generosity**. We need not be over-disturbed by this; I ﬁnd, hidden beneath Camus’s paradoxes, some of Kant’s wise observations on the “endless end” of the beautiful. Such, in any case, is  _The Stranger,_  a work detached from a life, unjustified and unjustifiable, sterile, momentary, already forsaken by its author, abandoned for other present things. And that is how we must accept it, as a brief communion between two men, the author and the reader, beyond reason, in the realm of the absurd.

 

 _The Stranger_  is not, however, to be regarded as a completely gratuitous work. Camus distinguishes, as we have mentioned, between the  _notion_  and the  _feeling_  of the absurd. He says, in this connection,

 

> “Deep feelings, like great works, are always more meaningful than they are aware of being. . . . **An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magniﬁcent or wretched, as the case may be** ”  _(The Myth of Sisyphus)_.

And he adds, a bit further on, “The feeling of the absurd is not the same as the  _idea_  of the absurd. The idea is grounded in the feeling, that is all. It does not exhaust it."  _The Myth of Sisyphus_  might be said to aim at giving us this idea, and  _The Stranger_  at giving us the feeling.

 

For Camus, on the contrary, the tragedy of human existence lies in the absence of any transcendence

 

> I do not know whether this world has a meaning that is beyond me. But I do know that I am unaware of this meaning and that, for the time being, it is impossible for me to know it. What can a meaning beyond my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. I understand the things I touch, things that offer me resistance.

 

Camus’s story is analytic and humorous. Like all artists, he  _invents,_  because he pretends to be reconstituting raw experience and because he slyly eliminates all the signiﬁcant links which are also part of the experience.

That is what Hume did when he stated that he could ﬁnd nothing in experience but isolated impressions. That is what the American neorealists still do when they deny the existence of any but external relations between phenomena. Contemporary philosophy has, however, established the fact that meanings are also part of the immediate data. But this would carry us too far aﬁeld. We shall simply indicate that the universe of the absurd man is the analytic world of the neo-realists. In literature, this method has proved its worth. It was Voltaire’s method in  _L’Ingénu_  and  _Micromégas,_  and Swift's in  _Gulliver's Travels_. **For the eighteenth century also had its own outsiders, “noble savages,” usually, who, transported to a strange civilization, perceived facts before being able to grasp their meaning. The effect of this discrepancy was to arouse in the reader the feeling of the absurd.** Camus seems to have this in mind on several occasions, particularly when he shows his hero reﬂecting on the reasons for his imprisonment.

It is this analytic process that explains the use of the American technique in  _The Stranger_. **The presence of death at the end of our path has made our future go up in smoke; our life has “no future”; it is a series of present moments. What does this mean, if not that the absurd man is applying his analytical spirit to Time?** Where Bergson saw an indestructible organization, he sees only a series of instants. It is the plurality of incommunicable moments that will ﬁnally account for the plurality of beings. **What our author borrows from Hemingway is thus the discontinuity between the clipped phrases that imitate the discontinuity of time.**

We are now in a better position to understand the form of his narrative. Each sentence is a present instant, but not an indecisive one that spreads like a stain to the following one. The sentence is sharp, distinct, and self-contained. It is separated by a void from the following one, just as Descartes’s instant is separated from the one that follows it. The world is destroyed and reborn from sentence to sentence. When the word makes its appearance it is a creation  _ex nihilo_. **The sentences in _The Stranger_  are islands. We bounce from sentence to sentence, from void to void.** It was in order to emphasize the isolation of each sentence unit that Camus chose to tell his story in the present perfect tense.[2] The simple past is the tense of continuity:  _“Il se promena longtemps.”_  These words refer us to a past perfect, to a future. The reality of the sentence is the verb, the act, with its transitive character and its transcendence.  _“Il s’est promené longtemps”_  conceals the verbality of the verb. The verb is split and broken in two.

On the one hand, we ﬁnd a past participle which has lost all transcendence and which is as inert as a thing; and on the other, we ﬁnd only the verb  _étre,_  which has merely a copulative sense and which joins the participle to the substantive as the attribute to the subject. **The transitive character of the verb has vanished; the sentence has frozen. Its present reality becomes the noun. Instead of acting as a bridge between past and future, it is merely a small, isolated, self-sufficient substance.**

 

A nineteenth-century naturalist would have written, “A bridge spanned the river.” Camus will have none of this anthropomorphism. He says “Over the river was a bridge.” This object thus immediately betrays its passiveness. It is  _there_  before us, plain and undifferentiated. “There were four negro men in the room . . . in front of the door was a lady I didn’t know. . . . Beside her was the director. . . .” People used to say that Jules Renard would end by writing things like “The hen lays.” Camus and many other contemporary writers would write “There is the hen and she lays.” The reason is that they like things for their own sake and do not want to dilute them in the ﬂux of duration. “There is water.” Here we have a bit of eternity—passive, impenetrable, incommunicable and gleaming! What sensual delight, if only we could touch it! To the absurd man, this is the one and only good. And that is why the novelist prefers these short-lived little sparkles, each of which gives a bit of pleasure, to an organized narrative.

This is what enables Camus to think that in writing  _The Stranger_  he remains silent. His sentence does not belong to the universe of discourse. It has neither ramiﬁcations nor extensions nor internal structure. It might be deﬁned, like Valéry’s sylph, as

 

> Neither seen nor known:  
>  The time of a bare breast  
>  Between two shifts.

It is very exactly measured by the time of a silent intution. If this is so, can we speak of Camus’s novel as something whole? All the sentences of his book are equal to each other, just as all the absurd man's experiences are equal. Each one sets up for itself and sweeps the others into the void. But, as a result, no single one of them detaches itself from the background of the others, except for the rare moments in which the author, abandoning these principles, becomes poetic.

 

The very dialogues are integrated into the narrative. Dialogue is the moment of explanation, of meaning, and to give it a place of honor would be to admit that meanings exist. Camus irons out the dialogue, summarizes it, renders it frequently as **indirect discourse**. **He denies it any typographic privileges, so that a spoken phrase seems like any other happening.**

Thus, when you start reading the book you feel as if you were listening to a monotonous, nasal, Arab chant rather than reading a novel. You may think that the novel is going to be like one of those tunes of which Courteline remarked that “they disappear, never to return” and stop all of a sudden. But the work gradually organizes itself before the reader's eyes and reveals its solid substructure.

There is not a single unnecessary detail, not one that is not returned to later on and used in the argument. And when we close the book, we realize that it could not have had any other ending. In this world that has been stripped of its causality and presented as absurd, the smallest incident has weight. There is no single one which does not help to lead the hero to crime and capital punishment.  _The Stranger_  is a classical work, an orderly work, composed about the absurd and against the absurd. Is this quite what the author was aiming at? I do not know. I am simply presenting the reader's opinion.


	7. SPUUGMEISJE 2: ANGRY BLACK WOMEN AND A GENDERLESS CHILD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://books.google.nl/books?hl=nl&lr=&id=aBRUjxPk_YUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA93&dq=black+female+sexuality&ots=F0JkwMEPmf&sig=6Xy5DuDsNBV2OHgid4XMaGEwA4k#v=onepage&q=black%20female%20sexuality&f=false  
> https://books.google.nl/books?id=4VYd4C9x9pUC&lpg=PA63&ots=qIhiRtnerJ&dq=black%20children%20gender&lr&hl=nl&pg=PA63#v=onepage&q=black%20children%20gender&f=false  
> file:///C:/Users/Gebruiker/Downloads/ob169-volledige-tekst_tcm44-435232.pdf
> 
> https://epdf.tips/reel-knockouts-violent-women-in-the-movies.html  
> https://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/eserv/rmit:6215/FitzRoy.pdf

_TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF BLACK FEMALE SEXUALITY: THE PROBLEMATIC OF SILENCE_

Evelynn M. Hammonds

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

(...) the construction of black women's sexuality, from the nineteenth century to the present, engages three sets of issues. First, there is the way black women's sexuality has been constructed in a binary opposition to that of white women: it is rendered simultaneously invisible, visible (exposed) hypervisible and pathologized in dominant discourses. Secondly I will descrive how resistance to these dominant discourses has been coded and lived by various groups of black women within black communities at different historical moments. Finally, I will discuss the limitations of these strategies of resistance in disrupting dominant discourses about black women's sexuality and the implications of this for black women with AIDS.

 

Black feminist theorists have almost universally described black women's sexuality, when viewed from the vantage of the dominant discourses, as an absence. In one o the earliest and most compelling discussions of black women's secuality, literary critic Hortense Spillers wrote,

 

 

 

 

> _Black women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting_ their _verb._

For writer Toni Morrison, black women's sexuality is one of the 'unspeakable things unspoken' of the African American experience.

(...)  **black women's bodies are always already colonized**.

 

Three themes emerge in this history:

  * the construction of the black female as the embodiment of sex and the attendant invisibility of black women as the unvoiced, unseen -everything that is not white.
  * the resistance of black women both to negative stereotypes of their sexuality and to the material effects of those stereotypes on black women's lives.
  * the evolution of a 'culture of dissemblance' and a 'politics of silence' by black women on the issue of their sexuality.



 

[ _red. shbab_ Through the symbol of Sarah Nartmann, the Hottentot Venus] the black female became the antithesis of European sexual mores and beauty and was relegated to the lowest position on the scale of human development.  **The image of the black female constructed in this period reflected everything the white female was not, or as art historian Lorraine O'Grady has put it, 'White is what woman is [was]; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gathers in) is what she had better not be'.**

 

Buttressed by the doctrine of the Cult of True Womanhood, this binary opposition [ _red. shbab_ of white women being pure and black women being 'promiscuous'] seemed to lock black women forever outside the ideology of womanhood so celebrated in the Victorian era.

 

(...) by the early twentieth century, [black women] had begun to promote a public silence about sexuality which, it could be argued, continues to the present. This 'politics of silence', as described by historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, emerged as a political strategy by black women reformers who hoped by their silence and by the promotion of proper Victorian morality to demonstrate the lie of the image of the sexually immoral black woman. (...) 'Only with secrecy,' Hine argues, 'thus achieving a self-imposed invisibility, could ordinary black women accrue the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own'.  **And by the projection of the image of a 'super moral' black woman, they hoped to garner grater respect, justice and opportunity for all black Americans.**

 

 

 

 

 

  _CH.7_  
THEORIES OF GENDER AND BLACK FAMILIES  
Ann Phoenix

 

* * *

 

 

  

 

[Black children] learn that their parents, and hence they, are excluded from positions of power within society. Black children simultaneously learn that black people are stereotyped in different ways to those in which white people are stereotyped. From this they learn that gender differences between black males and females are qualitatively different from white female-male differences. Hence black children learn about racism as well as about gender differentiation.

However, in contrast with what they learn from the wider society, black children learn more positive gender models from their own social networks. Black women's participation in the labour market means that black children grow up accepting that mothers can also be employed. The fact that black children are more likely than white children to live with other relatives as well as their parent(s) means they have a wider variety of people to interact with and with whom to develop close relationships.

While there are undoubtedly gender differences between black women and black men (see Hull  _et al.,_ 1982), the denial of power to black people that results from racism, and the fact that black women and black men occupy different gender positions from white woman and white men, mean that the 'dominant/subordinate model' of sexual power relationships is not applicable to black people in the same way it is to white people (Lorde, 1984).  
This does not mean that black people automatically reject the dominant ideological stereotypes of gender roles. Being subject to the same ideological forces as white people means that many black people accept dominant ideologies of gender (see Staples, 1985). This probably occurs for three reasons.

  * because being relatively powerless makes people desire the position, and so to espouse the attitudes of thse who are perceived to be more powerful (see Fanon, 1952; and Henriques  _et al._ , 1984).
  * because being at variance with accepted societal practice means that individuals are subject to stigmatization. Avowed acceptance of dominant ideology may well be (in Goffman's (1963) terms) in compensation for the stigma that attaches to individuals who do not fit societal norms.
  * because the pervasiveness of patriarchal structures means that individual subjectivity vannut help but be affected by them (Thompson, 1977).



 

(...) So, for example, the passivity and weakness that is meant to elicit a powerful male's protection is redundant for black women (and white working-class women) whose fathers and male peers do not occupy positions of power.  **It is not surprising then that black female schol students and white working-class school students are reported to be more boisterious at school than their white middle-class counterparts, and should be sceptical about the benefits of marriage for them (Sharpe, 1976; Bryan _et al.,_ 1985; Lees, 1986).**

 

 

_CONCLUSIONS_

**By ignoring issues of race and class, current theories of gender, and the research on which these are based, actually address the development of gender identity in the white middle vlasses. This means that black children (and white working-class children) are rendered invisible in the processes of normal gender development, but visible in pathological categories like 'father-absent' households.**

Theories of gender will become ecologically valid (Bronfenbrenner, 1977) if they take account of household organizations other than the nuclear family, and the different experiences of people on different classes and colours.

 

 

 

 

_MEISJESCRIMINALITEIT IN NEDERLAND_

N.M. Mertens  
M. Grapendaal  
B.J.W. Docter-Schamhardt

* * *

 

 

 

_Theorieën over ontwikkeling van gender-identiteit_

Opvattingen over mannelijk- en vrouwelijkheid spelen een rol bij de criminaliteit van volwassenen, maar ook en misschien zelfs meer bij adolescente jongens en meisjes. 

Daarbij komt dat jongens onzekerder zijn over hun mannelijke identiteit dan meisjes over hun vrouwelijke (Chodorow, 1978). Jongens moeten zich volgens haar psychoanalytisch geïnspireerde theorie eerst losmaken van de moeder om zich vervolgens te kunnen identificeren met de vader. Om die identificatie met de vader te realiseren en om zich voldoende mannelijk te voelen, behoren jongens zich sterker te onderscheiden van anderen dan meisjes dat moeten doen om zich voldoende vrouwelijk te voelen.

 

Maar niet van alle vrouwen wordt hetzelfde verwacht als ze volwassen zijn: klasse en etniciteit zijn hierbij van doorslaggevend belang. Uit Amerikaans onderzoek blijkt dat ook sociale klasse een rol speelt als het gaat over criminaliteit en opvattingen over vrouwelijkheid en mannelijkheid. **Het beeld van een _good girl_ weerspiegelt het vrouwelijke middenklasse-ideaal in Amerika, _bad girls_ hebben eigenschappen die aan lagere klassen worden toegeschreven en die eerder als mannelijk dan als vrouwelijk gelden (Campbell, 1984).**

 

 **Wanneer een derde structurerende factor, namelijk ras of huidskleur meegenomen wordt, doen zich intra-gender verschillen voor (Giordano, 1978; Lissenberg 1995).** Op dit punt wordt kritiek geuit op de eerdergenoemde power-controltheorie (de basis van sekseverschillen in delinquentie ligt in de verschillende socialisatie van jongens en meisjes in klassegebonden gezinsrelaties). Deze benadering gaat niet op voor de klassegebonden gezinsrelaties van vrouwen in minderheidsgroepen (Morash en Chesney-Lind, 1991). In een Amerikaans onderzoek is de relatieve invloed van klasse, gender en ras op de aard en de omvang van criminaliteit van jongeren onderzocht (Simpson en Elis, 1995). Daarbij is ook expliciet gekeken naar de verhoudingen binnen het gezin en de opvattingen over mannelijk- en vrouwelijkheid die jongeren aanhangen. De hypothese dat meisjescriminaliteit beter bedwongen wordt doordat meisjes zich eerder traditionele vrouwelijke levensstijlen eigen maken dan dat bij jongens met betrekking tot mannelijke levensstijlen het geval is, wordt slechts gedeeltelijk bevestigd in hun onderzoek. Zij vinden steun voor de gedachte dat de heersende traditionele opvattingen over mannelijkheid (man als enige kostwinner) en over vrouwelijkheid (de vrouw die thuis blijft en voor de kinderen zorgt) een remmende invloed hebben op delinquentie, zij het dat die invloed niet eenduidig vast te stellen is voor de verschillende typen van delinquentie en de verschillende typen jongeren. **Duidelijk is wel dat de genoemde heersende opvattingen niet voor zwarte jongeren gelden maar onderdeel zijn van blanke, klassegebonden opvoedingspraktijken. Wat meisjes betreft, kwam uit het onderzoek naar voor dat het aanhangen van de traditionele opvatting over vrouwelijkheid remmend werkt op gewelddadig crimineel gedrag van meisjes, maar in het geheel niet op vermogenscriminaliteit.**

Deze uitkomsten zijn volgens de auteurs niet zo verrassend: zowel het niet plegen van (bepaalde vormen van) criminaliteit als het plegen van (andere vormen van) criminaliteit kan een bevestiging zijn van de gender-identiteit in een bepaalde context of situatie. Vrouwen kunnen hun vrouwelijkheid bevestigen door niet crimineel te zijn in de zin dat ze geen geweldsdelicten plegen. Maar zij kunnen net zo goed hun vrouwelijkheid tonen door het plegen van 'crime in scripted ways' (Simpson en Elis, 1995). **Crimineel gedrag dat tot het handelingsrepertoire van vrouwen gerekend wordt (bijvoorbeeld diefstal en prostitutie), is in overeenstemming met wat mensen denken dat vrouwelijkheid in essentie betekent.** **Dat specifieke 'geoorloofde' criminele gedrag bevestigt bovendien het heersende denkbeeld over vrouwelijkheid. Hetzelfde geldt voor het plegen van agressie door mannen en de notie van mannelijkheid: 'violence draws on and affirms masculinity' (Simpson en Elis, 1995).** De stelling dat jongeren die grote steun van hun ouders ondervinden bij hun toekomstverwachtingen, minder crimineel gedrag vertonen dan andere jongeren, wordt ook niet geheel door de empirie bevestigd: zij gaat alleen op voor vermogenscriminaliteit. Op basis van een ander onderzoek is zelfs geconcludeerd dat bepaalde, klassegebonden opvoedingspraktijken die gericht zijn op opwaartse mobiliteit en waarbij het nemen van risico's bij jongens positief gewaardeerd wordt, wel eens een criminogeen effect kunnen hebben.

 

Nu is het zo dat de klasse- en etnische tegenstellingen die zich in de Amerikaanse samenleving voordoen, niet zonder meer te vergelijken zijn met de verhoudingen in de Nederlandse situatie. Wel is bekend dat het relatieve aandeel van allochtone jongeren in de geregistreerde criminaliteit in de grote Nederlandse steden groter is dan dat van autochtone jongeren. **De oververtegenwoordiging van jongens is echter bij de allochtonen nog sterker dan bij de autochtonen (Beker e.a., 1994). Dat betekent dat allochtone meisjes in Nederland juist minder vaak in contact komen met de politie dan autochtone. Toch dient het beeld over het aandeel van allochtone meisjes nog genuanceerd te worden: er blijken grote verschillen voor te komen bij meisjes met een verschillende etnische achtergrond. Zo zijn Surinaamse en Antilliaanse meisjes oververtegenwoordigd in de politiestatistieken, en Turkse en Marokkaanse meisjes juist ondervertegenwoordigd (Brouwers en Van der Laan, 1997).**

 

 

 

 

_VIOLENT WOMEN_

Lee FitzRoy

 

* * *

 

 

_Chapter Three: The ‘violences’ of women: Assumptions, definitions and statistics_

 

 **It is widely accepted that broad definitions of violence are also gendered (Sian 1998). Pearson (1997) argued that we have learnt to view men as the primary perpetrators of instrumental violence while assuming that women primarily perpetrate violence as an ‘out of control’ reaction to events (Pearson 1997: 11–12).** Often these forms of violence are enacted in the private realm of the home or family and some may be characterised as legitimate strategies to discipline children. Such behaviours may not have been specifically named as violent and, as a consequence, remain invisible in family violence research (Hegarty and Roberts 1998; Stark and Flitcraft 1996). Of interest for this study is the tension between current definitions of criminal violence, a social view of women’s capacity for violence and women’s actual acts of violence.

 

The choice to perpetrate violence is understood as a means by which the perpetrator **maintains** their position of power over the ‘other’ who may experience the violence as **an oppressive act**. This analysis acknowledges that a person can assert social, emotional or economic power over a victim without enacting overt physical violence.

 

Confusion over the types of behaviour that are regarded as violence also leads to confusion as to the types of women who perpetrate violence. Some women, especially white, middle-class and educated women, rarely come to the attention of, and are rarely monitored by, state regulatory bodies. **Therefore, the relationships between powerful and privileged women and their children, partners, elderly parents or disabled relatives are unlikely to fall under the gaze of statutory bodies. These state bodies regulate the lives of ‘other’ less powerful and often more ‘visible’ women. They include single, working class, lesbian, coloured and Indigenous women.** A number of social researchers have argued that these other women are ‘overly’ scrutinised by regulatory bodies (Carlen 1988; Carlen and Worrall 1987; Featherstone 1997b; Gordon 1989; Hancock 1997; Lorde 1984; Naffine 1987; Stewart and Tattersall 2000; Wise 1995). They may be defined as passive victims of circumstance who are unable to adequately care for their children or ‘undeserving’ mothers.

 

 **When seeking to define women’s use of violence we are faced with a paradox whereby our traditional assumptions about people who perpetrate violence do not fit with traditional assumptions about women and femininity.** This paradox may influence which crimes are named and which women are charged with, and imprisoned for, violent offences. Official legislative definitions and statistics therefore, while useful, are unable to provide a clear and unambiguous picture of women’s use of violence.

 

First, jurors may have developed ‘tougher’ and less tolerant views towards women who have perpetrated serious crimes, and have become more willing to find women guilty of indictable offences. It is possible that these ‘tougher’ community views are reflected in magistrates’ and judges’ increased use of imprisonment in contrast to the use of community-based orders, fines or suspended sentences. S **econdly, the documented increase in many women’s experience of poverty, homelessness and social disadvantage may have led to an increase in their participation in property crimes and social-security fraud. Thirdly, women’s experience of earlier assaults, substance use and sex work may have led to their greater involvement in drug and sex related crimes. Lastly, as a result of changes in social norms, more women may actively choose to participate in serious criminal assaults and use weapons.** I suggest that the increase in the proportion of women committing violent crimes and being imprisoned in Victoria reflects a complex intersection between these possible factors, however I am unable to definitively explain the increase.

 

The ABS noted that across Australia in 2003, 352 Indigenous women were incarcerated or held on remand (ABS 2003: 20). Indigenous women form 3.1 percent of the total offender population, eight percent of all Indigenous prisoners and nineteen percentage of the female prison population (Mouzos 2000: 51). The ABS noted that in 2002 one in four women prisoners in Australia were Indigenous as compared to the 1995 figure of one in five (2004b: 3). The number of Australian Indigenous women sentenced to prison had increased by 132 per cent from 1992 to 2002 (Office of the Status of Women 2003: 1, Figure 1). In Victoria as of June 2001 the imprisonment rate for Aboriginal women was 222 women per 100 000 Aboriginal women (Office of Correctional Services Commissioner 2003: 3). At June 2004 of the 196 women prisoners, nine women (4.6 percent) were Indigenous (Corrections Victoria 2004: 1). **Researchers suggest that this overrepresentation can be attributed to a number of factors including the effect of colonialisation and the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands, the impact of government policy that removed Indigenous children from their families, systemic racism in institutional systems, along with high levels of unemployment, poverty, illiteracy and substance use in Aboriginal communities.** A more detailed analysis of the influence of these factors on the incarceration rates of Aboriginal women is outside the scope of this study. It is extremely difficult to accurately ascertain the different cultural groups of women who perpetrate violence and/or who are incarcerated in the criminal justice system. **Anecdotal evidence suggests that often Indigenous and Maori women are more visible in the public arena and more ‘easily’ identified as violent offenders due to racist assumptions as to ‘which’ women engage in violence.**

[ _redSHBAB._ Salomé is constant ON DISPLAY]

[ _redSHBAB._ Check de interviews met de vrouwen voor  _ways of speech_ ]

 

 

Andi described the difficult relationships she experienced with members of her family including her mother:

 

> _It’s both of them, plus the way mum treats dad. Don’t get me wrong, they love each other but mum can be a bit of handful. … Every time she went to hit me, she’d get an elbow in every place, when she went to slap me she would hurt her hand. Is that because you would hurt her? I was just defending myself (Andi, first meeting: 8)._
> 
> Did she ever physically hurt you?
> 
> _No, every time she went to hit me, she’d hurt herself._
> 
> How would that happen?
> 
> _I put my elbows up or something (Andi, second meeting: 4–5)._

I believe Andi had assaulted her mother either in retaliation or while defending herself from assaults perpetrated by her mother. I found this interesting for two reasons. First, the issue of violence perpetrated by women against their adolescent daughters or retaliatory violence between women and their daughters would benefit from further examination. Second, I believe that although Andi and I were meeting to discuss her use of violence, I do not think she felt comfortable to talk about herself assaulting her mother. **It is possible that Andi believed that assaulting her mother was more shameful, therefore more difficult to discuss, than her assaults on neighbours and strangers.** It appeared that Andi had conflicting feelings about her mother whom she admired for standing by her beliefs but “who would knock down someone who got in her way”, including Andi (second meeting: 12-13). I was not sure whether Andi was suggesting that her mother would knock Andi down physically or verbally. Andi said little about her relationship with her father, but she did describe a somewhat easier relationship with him. She said that he listened to her and did not judge her. Being heard and noticed by her father was important to her (second meeting: 13). 

 

[ _On councelling and psychiatric care after going to jail for bomb threats amongst other things_ ] When we met for the second time she described how she had moved from feelings of anger to sadness (Andi, second meeting: 2). **Most counsellors agree that when anger is both expressed and legitimatised the process can create emotional space for the expression of other feelings including sadness and grief.**

 

 [p.138]


	8. ON WRITING: 5. THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> INTERVIEWS  
> https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4444/simone-de-beauvoir-the-art-of-fiction-no-35-simone-de-beauvoir  
> https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/joan-didion-the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion  
> https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/michel-houellebecq-the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq  
> https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4389/allen-ginsberg-the-art-of-poetry-no-8-allen-ginsberg  
> https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7040/dany-laferriere-the-art-of-fiction-no-237-dany-laferriere
> 
> HOW I BEGAN TO WRITE  
> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/06/how-i-began-to-write/#more-134152

_SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR  
_

# The Art of Fiction No. 35

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interviewed by Madeleine Gobeil

### ISSUE 34, SPRING-SUMMER 1965

* * *

 

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
In every one of your novels we find a female character who is misled by false notions and who is threatened by madness.

DE BEAUVOIR  
Lots of modern women are like that. **Women are obliged to play at being what they aren’t, to play, for example, at being great courtesans, to fake their personalities. They’re on the brink of neurosis.** I feel very sympathetic toward women of that type. They interest me more than the well-balanced housewife and mother. There are, of course, women who interest me even more, those who are both true and independent, who work and create.

INTERVIEWER  
None of your female characters are immune from love. You like the romantic element.

DE BEAUVOIR  
Love is a great privilege. Real love, which is very rare, enriches the lives of the men and women who experience it.

INTERVIEWER  
In your novels, it seems to be the women—I’m thinking of Françoise in  _She Came to Stay_ and Anne in  _The Mandarins_ —who experience it most.

DE BEAUVOIR  
**The reason is that, despite everything, women give more of themselves in love because most of them don’t have much else to absorb them. Perhaps they’re also more capable of deep sympathy, which is the basis of love. Perhaps it’s also because I can project myself more easily into women than into men. My female characters are much richer than my male characters.**

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
In your opinion, why is it that, despite the reputation he’s had for twenty years, Sartre the writer remains misunderstood and is still violently attacked by critics?

DE BEAUVOIR  
For political reasons. Sartre is a man who has violently opposed the class into which he was born and which therefore regards him as a traitor. But that’s the class which has money, which buys books. **Sartre’s situation is paradoxical. He’s an antibourgeois writer who is read by the bourgeoisie and admired by it as one of its products. The bourgeoisie has a monopoly on culture and thinks that it gave birth to Sartre. At the same time, it hates him because he attacks it.**

INTERVIEWER  
In an interview with Hemingway in  _The Paris Review_ , he said, “All you can be sure about, in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it.” Of course, you don’t agree. Do you still believe in “commitment”?

DE BEAUVOIR  
Hemingway was precisely the type of writer who never wanted to commit himself. I know that he was involved in the Spanish civil war, but as a journalist. Hemingway was never deeply committed, so he thinks that what is eternal in literature is what isn’t dated, isn’t committed. I don’t agree. In the case of many writers, it’s also their political stand which makes me like or dislike them. There aren’t many writers of former times whose work was really committed. And although one reads Rousseau’s  _Social Contract_  as eagerly as one reads his  _Confessions_ , one no longer reads  _The New Héloïse_.

 

 

DE BEAUVOIR  
There’s certainly a return to the right in France. The new novel itself isn’t reactionary, nor are its authors. A sympathizer can say that they want to do away with certain bourgeois conventions. These writers aren’t disturbing. In the long run, Gaullism brings us back to Pétainism, and it’s only to be expected that a collaborator like La Rochelle and an extreme reactionary like Nimier be held in high esteem again. **The bourgeoisie is showing itself again in its true colors—that is, as a reactionary class.** Look at the success of Sartre’s  _The Words_. There are several things to note. It’s perhaps—I won’t say his best book, but one of his best. At any rate, it’s an excellent book, an exciting display of virtuosity, an amazingly written work. At the same time, the reason it has had such success is that it’s a book that is not “committed.” When the critics say that it’s his best book, along with  _Nausea_ , one should bear in mind that  _Nausea_  is an early work, a work that is not committed, and that it is more readily accepted by the left and right alike than are his plays. **The same thing happened to me with _The Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter_. Bourgeois women were delighted to recognize their own youth in it. The protests began with  _The Prime of Life_ and continued with  _Force of Circumstance_. The break is very clear, very sharp.**

 

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
At the end of  _Force of Circumstance_  you say: **“As I look back with incredulity at that credulous adolescent, I am astounded to see how I was swindled.”** This remark seems to have given rise to all kinds of misunderstandings.

DE BEAUVOIR  
People—particularly enemies—have tried to interpret it to mean that my life has been a failure, either because I recognize the fact that I was mistaken on a political level or because I recognize that after all a woman should have had children, etc. Anyone who reads my book carefully can see that I say the very opposite, that I don’t envy anyone, that I’m perfectly satisfied with what my life has been, that I’ve kept all my promises and that consequently if I had my life to live over again I wouldn’t live it any differently. I’ve never regretted not having children insofar as what I wanted to do was to write.

Then why “swindled”? When one has an existentialist view of the world, like mine, the paradox of human life is precisely that one tries to  _be_  and, in the long run, merely exists. It’s because of this discrepancy that when you’ve laid your stake on being—and, in a way you always do when you make plans, even if you actually know that you can’t succeed in being—when you turn around and look back on your life, you see that you’ve simply existed. In other words, life isn’t behind you like a solid thing, like the life of a god (as it is conceived, that is, as something impossible). Your life is simply a human life.

So one might say, as Alain did, and I’m very fond of that remark, “Nothing is promised us.” In one sense, it’s true. In another, it’s not. **Because a bourgeois boy or girl who is given a certain culture is actually promised things. I think that anyone who had a hard life when he was young won’t say in later years that he’s been “swindled.” But when I say that I’ve been swindled I’m referring to the seventeen-year-old girl who daydreamed in the country near the hazel bush about what she was going to do later on. I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.** There are also Mallarmé’s lines about “the perfume of sadness that remains in the heart,” I forget exactly how they go.

 

 

 

> **I’ve had what I wanted, and, when all is said and done, what one wanted was always something else.**

A woman psychoanalyst wrote me a very intelligent letter in which she said that “in the last analysis, desires always go far beyond the object of desire.” The fact is that I’ve had everything I desired, but the “far beyond” which is included in the desire itself is not attained when the desire has been fulfilled. When I was young, I had hopes and a view of life which all cultured people and bourgeois optimists encourage one to have and which my readers accuse me of not encouraging in them. That’s what I meant, and I wasn’t regretting anything I’ve done or thought.

(...)

 **“I’m swindled” also implies something else—namely, that life has made me discover the world as it is, that is, a world of suffering and oppression, of undernourishment for the majority of people, things that I didn’t know when I was young and when I imagined that to discover the world was to discover something beautiful.** In that respect, too, I was swindled by bourgeois culture, and that’s why I don’t want to contribute to the swindling of others and why I say that I was swindled, in short, so that others aren’t swindled. It’s really also a problem of a social kind. **In short, I discovered the unhappiness of the world little by little, then more and more, and finally, above all, I felt it in connection with the Algerian war and when I traveled.**

 

 

 

 

_JOAN DIDION_

# The Art of Fiction No. 71

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interviewed by Linda Kuehl

### ISSUE 74, FALL-WINTER 1978

* * *

 

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
Do you have any writing rituals?

DIDION  
The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. **If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits.** Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. **Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it.** In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.

INTERVIEWER  
What’s the main difference between the process of fiction and the process of nonfiction?

DIDION  
The element of discovery takes place, in nonfiction, not during the writing but during the research. This makes writing a piece very tedious. You already know what it’s about.

 

 

DIDION  
Well, I grew up in a dangerous landscape. I think people are more affected than they know by landscapes and weather. Sacramento was a very extreme place. It was very flat, flatter than most people can imagine, and I still favor flat horizons. The weather in Sacramento was as extreme as the landscape. There were two rivers, and these rivers would flood in the winter and run dry in the summer. Winter was cold rain and tulle fog. Summer was 100 degrees, 105 degrees, 110 degrees. Those extremes affect the way you deal with the world. **It so happens that if you're a writer the extremes show up. They don’t if you sell insurance.**

 

 

 

 

 

_MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ_

# The Art of Fiction No. 206

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interviewed by Susannah Hunnewell

### ISSUE 194, FALL 2010

* * *

 

 

 

HOUELLEBECQ  
(...) I read Baudelaire oddly early, when I was about thirteen, but Pascal was the shock of my life. I was fifteen. I was on a class trip to Germany, my first trip abroad, and strangely I had brought the  _Pensées_  of Pascal. I was terrified by this passage:

 

 

 

> **“Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.”**

I think it affected me so deeply because I was raised by my grandparents. Suddenly I realized that they were going to die and probably soon. That’s when I discovered death.

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
In the end you went to work as a computer programmer. Did you have previous experience?

HOUELLEBECQ  
I knew nothing about it. But this was back when there was a huge need for programming and no schools to speak of. So it was easy to get into. But I loathed it immediately.

INTERVIEWER  
So what made you write your first novel,  _Whatever_ , about a computer programmer and his sexually frustrated friend?

HOUELLEBECQ  
**I hadn’t seen any novel make the statement that entering the workforce was like entering the grave.** That from then on, nothing happens and you have to pretend to be interested in your work. And, furthermore, that some people have a sex life and others don’t just because some are more attractive than others. **I wanted to acknowledge that if people don’t have a sex life, it’s not for some moral reason, it’s just because they’re ugly. Once you’ve said it, it sounds obvious, but I wanted to say it.**

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
You have said, **“The struggle between poetry and prose is a constant in my life. If you obey the poetic impulse, you risk becoming unreadable. If you disobey, you’re ready for a career as an honest ‘storyteller.’”**

HOUELLEBECQ  
You might get the impression that I have a mild contempt for storytelling, which is only somewhat true. For example, I really like Agatha Christie. She obeys the rules of the genre at first, but then occasionally she manages to do very personal things. In my case, I think I start from the opposite point. **At first, I don’t obey, I don’t plot, but then from time to time, I say to myself, Come on, there’s got to be a story. I control myself. But I will never give up a beautiful fragment merely because it doesn’t fit in the story.**

 

 

HOUELLEBECQ  
The real inspiration was the experiments of Alain Aspect in 1982. **They demonstrated the EPR paradox: that when particles interact, their destinies become linked. When you act on one, the effect spreads instantly to the other, even if they are great distances apart.** That really struck me, to think that if two things are connected once, they will be forever. It marks a fundamental philosophical shift. Ever since the disappearance of religious belief, the current reigning philosophy has been materialism, which says we are alone and reduces humanity to biology. Man as calculable as billiard balls and completely perishable. That worldview is undermined by the EPR paradox. So the novel was inspired by this idea of what could be the next metaphysical mutation. It has to be less depressing than materialism. Which, let’s face it, is pretty depressing.

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
Of course, it was the numerous sex scenes that got you a lot of attention in the media.

HOUELLEBECQ  
I’m not sure that there are such an unusual number of sex scenes in my novel. I don’t think that’s what was shocking. **What shocked people was that I depicted sexual failure. I wrote about sexuality in a nonglorifying way. Most of all I described a basic reality: a person filled with sexual desire who can’t satisfy it.** That’s what people don’t like to hear about. Sex is supposed to be positive. Showing frustrated sexual desire is obscene. But it’s also the truth. The real question is, Who is allowed to have sex? I don’t understand, for example, how teachers survive with all these alarming young girls. When women become sexual tourists, that is even more hidden, shameful, and taboo than when men do it. Just as, when a woman professor puts her hand on a student’s thigh, it’s even worse, even more unspeakable.

INTERVIEWER  
A constant refrain in your novels is that sex and money are the dominant values of this world.

HOUELLEBECQ  
It’s strange, I’m fifty years old and I still haven’t made up my mind whether sex is good or not. I have my doubts about money too. So it’s odd that I’m considered an ideological writer. It seems to me that I am mostly exposing my doubts. I do have certain convictions. For example, the fact that you can pay a girl, that I think is a good thing. Undeniably. An immense sign of progress.

INTERVIEWER  
You mean prostitutes?

HOUELLEBECQ  
Yes. I’m all for prostitution.

INTERVIEWER  
Why?

HOUELLEBECQ  
Because everybody wins. It doesn’t interest me personally, but I think it’s a good thing. A lot of British and Americans pay for it. They’re happy. The girls are happy. They make a lot of money. 

INTERVIEWER  
How do you know that the girls are happy?

HOUELLEBECQ  
I talk to them. It’s very difficult because they don’t really speak English, but I talk to them.

INTERVIEWER  
What about the more commonly held idea that these women are victims who are forced into these circumstances?

HOUELLEBECQ  
It’s not true. Not in Thailand. It’s just stupid to have objections about it.

INTERVIEWER  
They say that you are on the right politically because in  _The Elementary Particles_  you seem to be against the liberalism of the sixties. What do you think of that interpretation?

HOUELLEBECQ  
What I think, fundamentally, is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes. It may be regrettable that the family unit is disappearing. You could argue that it increases human suffering. But regrettable or not, there’s nothing we can do. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. **I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values. He’s exaggerating in an amusing way. But that’s what I do: I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values.**

 

HOUELLEBECQ  
For the moment my desire to be loved is enough to spur me to action. I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think. And when I sense that what I think is going to cause displeasure, I rush to say it with real enthusiasm. And deep down, I want to be loved despite that.

Of course, there’s no guarantee this will last.

 

 

 

_ALLEN GINSBERG_

# The Art of Poetry No. 8

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interviewed by Thomas Clark

### ISSUE 37, SPRING 1966

* * *

 

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
Has there been a time when fear of censorship or similar trouble has made your own expression difficult?

GINSBERG  
This is so complicated a matter. The beginning of the fear with me was, you know, what would my father say to something that I would write. At the time, writing “Howl”—for instance like I assumed when writing it that it was something that could not be published because I wouldn’t want my daddy to see what was in there. About my sex life, being fucked in the ass, imagine your father reading a thing like that, was what I thought. Though that disappeared as soon as the thing was real, or as soon as I manifested my ... you know, it didn’t make that much importance finally. That was sort of a help for writing, because I assumed that it wouldn’t be published, therefore I could say anything that I wanted. **So literally just for myself or anybody that I knew personally well, writers who would be willing to appreciate it with a breadth of tolerance—in a piece of work like _Howl_. Who wouldn’t be judging from a moralistic viewpoint but looking for evidences of humanity or secret thought or just actual truthfulness.**

Then there’s later the problem of publication—we had a lot. The English printer refused at first I think, we were afraid of customs; the first edition we had to print with asterisks on some of the dirty words, and then the  _Evergreen Review_  in reprinting it used asterisks, and various people reprinting it later always wanted to use the Evergreen version rather than the corrected legal City Lights version—like I think there’s an anthology of Jewish writers, I forgot who edited that, but a couple of the high-class intellectuals from Columbia. I had written asking them specifically to use the later City Lights version, but they went ahead and printed an asterisked version. I forget what was the name of that—something like  _New Generation of Jewish Writing_ , Philip Roth, etc.

 

INTERVIEWER  
Do you take difficulties like these as social problems, problems of communication simply, or do you feel they also block your own ability to express yourself for yourself?

GINSBERG  
The problem is, where it gets to literature, is this. We all talk among ourselves and we have common understandings, and we say anything we want to say, and we talk about our assholes, and we talk about our cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re gonna fuck tomorrow, or what kinda love affair we have, or when we got drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in Prague—anybody tells one’s friends about that. **So then—what happens if you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse?** **The problem is to break down that distinction: When you approach the Muse to talk as frankly as you would talk with yourself or with your friends. So I began finding, in conversations with Burroughs and Kerouac and Gregory Corso, in conversations with people whom I knew well, whose souls I respected, that the things we were telling each other for real were totally different from what was already in literature.** And that was Kerouac’s great discovery in  _On the Road_. The kinds of things that he and Neal Cassady were talking about, he finally discovered were the subject matter for what he wanted to write down. That meant, at that minute, a complete revision of what literature was supposed to be, in his mind, and actually in the minds of the people that first read the book. Certainly in the minds of the critics, who had at first attacked it as not being ... proper structure, or something. In other words, a gang of friends running around in an automobile. Which obviously is like a great picaresque literary device, and a classical one. And was not recognized, at the time, as suitable literary subject matter.

INTERVIEWER  
So it’s not just a matter of themes—sex, or any other one ...

GINSBERG  
**It’s the ability to commit to writing, to _write_ , the same way that you ... are!** Anyway! You have many writers who have preconceived ideas about what literature is supposed to be, and their ideas seem to exclude that which makes them most charming in private conversation. Their faggishness, or their campiness, or their neurasthenia, or their solitude, or their goofiness, or their—even—masculinity, at times. Because they think that they’re gonna write something that sounds like something else that they’ve read before, instead of sounds like them. Or comes from their own life. In other words, there’s no distinction, there should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know, to begin with. **As we know it every day, with each other. And the hypocrisy of literature has been ... you know like there’s supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different from—in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our quotidian inspired lives.**

It’s also like in Whitman, “I find no fat sweeter than that which sticks to my own bones,” that is to say the self-confidence of someone who knows that he’s really alive, and that his existence is just as good as any other subject matter.

 

 

 

 

 

> **The rhythm of the long line is also an animal cry.**

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
So you’re following that feeling and not a thought or a visual image?

GINSBERG  
It’s simultaneous. **The poetry generally is like a rhythmic articulation of feeling.** The feeling is like an impulse that rises within—just like sexual impulses, say; it’s almost as defi�nite as that. It’s a feeling that begins somewhere in the pit of the stomach and rises up forward in the breast and then comes out through the mouth and ears, and comes forth a croon or a groan or a sigh. Which, if you put words to it by looking around and seeing and trying to describe what’s making you sigh—and sigh in words—you simply articulate what you’re feeling. As simple as that. Or actually what happens is, at best what happens, is there’s a definite body rhythm that has no definite words, or may have one or two words attached to it, one or two key words attached to it. **And then, in writing it down, it’s simply by a process of association that I find what the rest of the statement is—what can be collected around that word, what that word is connected to. Partly by simple association, the first thing that comes to my mind like “Moloch is” or “Moloch who,” and then whatever comes out. But that also goes along with a definite rhythmic impulse, like DA de de DA de de DA de de DA DA. “ _Mo_ loch whose  _eyes_  are a  _thou_ sand blind  _windows_.” **

Usually during the composition, step by step, word by word and adjective by adjective, if it’s at all spontaneous, I don’t know whether it even makes sense sometimes. **Sometimes I do know it makes complete sense, and I start crying. Because I realize I’m hitting some area which is absolutely true.** And in that sense applicable universally, or understandable universally. In that sense able to survive through time—in that sense to be read by somebody and wept to, maybe, centuries later. In that sense prophecy, because it touches a common key ... What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It’s that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint—a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years.

 

 

 

 

# Dany Laferrière, The Art of Fiction No. 237

  


Interviewed by Adam Leith Gollner

### Issue 222, Fall 2017

* * *

 

 

 

Laferrière  
The dictionary doesn’t have individual contributions. It’s like building a cathedral. The workers are unknown. But one of the things I tend to do is suggest that it might be interesting to have examples of things that aren’t from France. If it’s a wind, which we worked on recently, does it always have to be the  _mistral_? What about the winds of elsewhere? How about zephyrs or siroccos? In French, there exists an enormous variety of classifications, proverbs, and witticisms about winds. There are winds that push ships as well as winds that come from the gut—the noisy, bodily winds of Rabelais.  _All_  shadings have to be in the dictionary. And in circumstances like this, you realize that people always remain, in a way, children—even august adults. Words that concern the inner workings of the human body can still provoke a smile or a laugh, even within the Académie française.

 

INTERVIEWER  
You are known for your memorable titles, which are often playful. Did  _I Am a Japanese Writer_  really start with the title? 

Laferrière  
It certainly did. My publisher in Paris was interested in the ways that Caribbean and Creole writers treat the question of identity. I wasn’t at all interested in that. **What interested me was, if literature belongs to everyone, if books belong to everyone, if anyone can go buy any book at a bookstore as soon as they get some money together—and if you can even buy a book without being able to read—then why can’t we be whatever kind of writers we want to be?**

 

[About  _How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired_.] INTERVIEWER  
Humor plays a part in the title, but is there also an element of mockery to it?

Laferrière

No, no, not at all. It was more about having a rapport with literature, but in a casual, unconventional way. **It was more about what sort of writer I wanted to be—laid back. And racism wasn’t at the center of the book either. Because of the title, I knew I’d get into it, but not in a frontal, direct way. The racism in the book is a hedonistic racism, which is to say, a celebratory one.**

INTERVIEWER  
Hedonistic racism? Celebratory racism? 

Laferrière  
The character is thrilled to be misunderstood, to be looked down upon. **He comes off as “just” a young Negro, but then you speak with him and he can talk about Marguerite Duras, James Baldwin, Gabrielle Roy, Hölderlin, Swinburne, Leonard Cohen—plus, he can speak about them with a sense of detachment.** It’s as though he says, From a distance, you may see me as a Negro, but when you get closer you’ll be ashamed to not have believed that this young man could have so many layers. And then you feel bad that you misjudged him. 

INTERVIEWER  
You intended for the book to be misjudged?  

Laferrière  
I saw it as being in the vein of **Basquiat**. At first, it just seems like graffiti—but then you see all the traces of Western culture within the images. You see Leonardo da Vinci, you see Cubism, but drawn with very contemporary lines, as though Picasso were tagging with spray paint. That’s what I wanted to do. Here was a character talking about Montreal without hiding his true nature. He’s a reader, an immigrant, but also a man who knows the city. We weren’t in the ghetto, or lost in any nostalgia for the country he left behind, or in a slum in his newly adopted homeland. 

 

Laferrière  
I’ve always loved that someone once wrote of  _Dangerous Liaisons_  that it gave its century its bad reputation. I would gladly accept all the negative articles that have been published about me just to have a phrase like that said about my work. But the theme that dominates the book is freedom. And friendship as well. **It’s about the freedom you can only enjoy if you live in a place where you weren’t born.** The narrator says, The fact of being in a place we don’t know, where we can’t situate ourselves—it’s a dream! And in a dream, we do what we want. We feel what we want to feel. We dream what we want to dream.

 

[About the death of his friend and resistance against Duvaliers regime]As for rebellion, it’s better to talk about an interesting movie and that people go see it. **You don’t need to die.** For me, being political is discussing literature. 

INTERVIEWER  
What do you mean?

Laferrière  
It’s writing books. It’s the fomenting of ideas. It’s to be free and accessible, to meet people and travel. **For me, writers are what the priest has been throughout history, this person we pay to talk about spirituality. I’ve always loved the figure of the priest—a guy who is paid tax-free. All we ask of him is that he speak of the soul. Three times a day. And give mass and be in charge of the rituals, blessing the newborn and the dead, marrying people. For me, the writer is the modern equivalent of that.**

 

Laferrière  
Yes, it’s as simple as that. For me, a writer who is too engaged politically is a writer who has forgotten the energy that came over them when they read their first major book,  _Les misérables_  or  _Moby-Dick_.For me a writer too engaged in the concrete realities of politics is a writer who doubts his or her own talent, **because the writer should be able to touch everyone everywhere at all times.**

 

INTERVIEWER  
While preparing for this interview, it didn’t occur to me that we would end up talking about race.

Laferrière  
It would be more noteworthy if we didn’t discuss it—if we didn’t feel the need to discuss it. I wrote a book about this, called  _Je suis fatigué_ , “I am tired.” It’s about how tired I was of being seen as a Caribbean writer, as a Quebecois writer, as an ethnic writer, as an exiled writer—instead of as a writer tout court. **We all know nationalist cultures are boring.** We all come from a place where we were born, we all have a connection to our childhood and what happened then, and all of that affects how we write. 

INTERVIEWER  
How would you say that coming from Haiti has shaped your writing? 

Laferrière  
In Haiti, I think the memory of being warriors, the memory of independence, lives on. People are proud to have made it through, to have survived. They define themselves based on their resilience. That’s the memory of the slave who has become independent through warfare **. “Don’t forget—I’ve already broken these chains before. Just because I happen to be poor doesn’t change anything.”**

 

INTERVIEWER  
Are all your books written in the present tense?

Laferrière  
Yes. Even the books about my childhood. **It’s a continual present. It’s a very hot present. Burning in the present indicative. It’s because I find that it’s the only time that exists. The past is found in memory, and I don’t trust memory. And the future is a hope of people who live in countries where life expectancy is very long.** I was raised by my grandmother in a place where each day we looked to find what we would eat. Each day had to be lived. At the end of the day, as we were going to bed, we would thank the Lord for having allowed us to live such a full day all the way to the end—we are not dead, we were not hungry. I wrote about it in  _The Return_. W **e’re born in the morning, we grow up at noon, and we die in the evening.**

[ _redSHBAB._   _belangrijk voor Salomé, het schrijven in die continue tegenwoordige tijd zorgt ervoor dat je weet dat er haast zit achter wat ze zegt. De mogelijkheid tot zelfmoord of zelfdestructie moet constant aanwezig zijn in hoe ze tegen de lezer praat_ ]

 

INTERVIEWER  
At one point in that book, someone asks the main character, your authorial stand-in, where he’s from, and he responds that he is from Madagascar—on Thursday nights. 

Laferrière  
Yes, he’s erasing his traces. He says he’s from Harlem or the Côte d’Ivoire or Madagascar on Thursday nights. To be from Haiti, to be imbued with coffee, the scent of mangoes, the taste of avocados, the smell of leaves, of jasmine, of ylang-ylang—those things came from my birth. They weren’t things I decided. But I could decide what to be in Montreal. **I severed my ties with Haiti to break the great sorcerer’s spell—that of the dictator, who says, You will be obsessed with me, and you will think only of me. I can do other things, but you, you will think of avenging yourself, of getting worked up, and you will think of nothing but me.**

 

[On working at a bank]If you don’t know how to do things properly, I learned, you will be paid better than those who know how to do it and who go home on time.  

INTERVIEWER  
That is a classic Laferrière life lesson. 

Laferrière  
 **First off, you need to not do things. Second, you need to not know how to do things.** By writing and by not trying to make any money or even touch it, I became rich. I don’t believe in the action of receiving money. **If Basquiat hadn’t been able to sell his paintings, he might still be alive. A junkie who can sell a painting for sixty thousand dollars is a dead man.** I often talk about a girl I met in Haiti way back when. She was a young woman who was a semi-prostitute. She told me, I’m not a prostitute. I don’t want money—but I want everything that money can buy. And that’s maybe my definition of myself as well. 

INTERVIEWER  
You describe yourself in an extremely unguarded way in your books. That must sometimes be difficult for those around you. 

Laferrière  
They’re novels. My wife, for example, knows that she’s reading a novel. She’s been living with me since 1979, after all, so she doesn’t try to understand me by reading my books. **Realism isn’t real. And the more I try to get close to myself, the more I’m hiding something. There is nothing more false than real life.**

 

[When asked about his time on the streets/just arriving in Montreal/Quebec]Laferrière  
To watch someone see you, when you are begging or homeless, and the person isn’t scandalized. He’s not happy about it, but he is thinking if someone has to be homeless, it might as well be you. If you saw that someone you went to school with had become homeless, you would be scandalized. You’d say to yourself, It can’t possibly be! But for all the others who are homeless, it can’t possibly be either! But it’s like that when you don’t know the person—you are categorized by race, or as a part of society that we accept seeing in a miserable situation. **Native Americans drinking on a street corner or blacks in dire circumstances—these are things society thinks are normal. I’m not saying they accept it, but it’s something they’ve always seen.** Well, I’ve been in that situation. I’ve been seen that way—He’s an immigrant and not white, and he’s in dire straits, that’s normal.

> **There is nothing more extraordinary than seeing compassion in someone’s eyes, but not the slightest surprise at your situation.** That is what it is to be a desert island, with no one to protect you—which could plunge some people into despair, bordering on insanity. But for a writer, it can be interesting. Because you can observe society, since you are completely invisible. No one sees you. People will say and do anything in front of you. 

 

 

INTERVIEWER  
You’ve said, in speaking about Haitian poets, that writers have a duty to promote work they admire. 

Laferrière  
Yes, it’s even more important than writing, to help another writer become known. There’s nothing charitable or Christian about it. When I write about someone I like and then someone says, Hey, I didn’t know about that writer, and now I’m quite happy to know them—at that moment, I feel as though I maybe wrote that author’s books.  _It was me who wrote that!_  For me, making a great writer better known is a way of being that great writer. It isn’t just poets I love, like Ida Faubert, Magloire-Saint-Aude, Davertige, and Carl Brouard. It’s also Borges, who made me learn about so many writers—not only French writers but also Locke, Kant, Schopenhauer, countless others. Borges used to say that originality is a modern superstition. **Instead of trying to be original, we should just try to make known what already exists.**

 

 

 

 

 

# How I Began to Write

 

 

 

By [Gabriel García Márquez](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/author/ggarciamarquez/)  March 6, 2019

* * *

 _Gabriel García Márquez delivered the following speech at the Athenaeum of Caracas, in Venezuela, on May 3, 1970._

It had never occurred to me that I could be a writer, but in my student days Eduardo Zalamea Borda, editor of the literary supplement of  _El Espectador_ , in Bogotá, published a note in which he said that the younger generation of writers had nothing to offer, that a new short-story writer, a new novelist, could not be seen anywhere. And he concluded by declaring that he was often reproached because his paper published only the very well-known names of old writers and nothing by the young, whereas the truth, he said, was that no young people were writing.

 **Then a feeling of solidarity with my generational companions arose in me, and I resolved to write a story simply to shut the mouth of Eduardo Zalamea Borda, who was my great friend or, at least, became my great friend later.** I sat down, wrote the story, and sent it to  _El Espectador_. I had my second shock the following Sunday when I opened the paper and  
there was my full-page story with a note in which Eduardo Zalamea Borda acknowledged that he had been wrong, because obviously with “that story the genius of Colombian literature had emerged,” or something along those lines. 

This time I really did get sick, and I said to myself: “What a mess I’ve got myself into! What do I do now so Eduardo Zalamea Borda won’t look bad?” Keep on writing was the answer. I always had to face the problem of subjects: I was obliged to find the story before I could write it.

And this allows me to tell you something that I can verify now, after having published five books: **the job of writer is perhaps the only one that becomes more difficult the more you do it. The ease with which I sat down one afternoon to write that story can’t be compared to the work it costs me now to write a page**. As for my method of working, it’s fairly consistent with what I’m telling you now. I never know how much I’ll be able to write or what I’m going to write about. I hope I’ll think of something, and when I do come up with an idea that I consider good enough to write down, I begin to go over it in my mind and let it keep maturing. When it’s finished (and sometimes many years go by, as in the case of  _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ , which I thought over for nineteen years)—I repeat, **when it’s finished—then I sit down to write it, and that’s when the most difficult part begins, and the part that bores me most. Because the most delicious part of a story is thinking about it, rounding it out, turning it over and over, so that when the time comes to sit down and write it, it doesn’t interest you very much, or at least it doesn’t interest me very much, the idea that’s been turned over and over.**


	9. ON WRITING: 6. RANDOM DOCUMENTATION

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.documentjournal.com/2018/04/novelists-edouard-louis-and-zadie-smith-on-writing-in-a-distracting-political-present/

# Novelists Édouard Louis and Zadie Smith on writing in a distracting political present

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 **Nathan Taylor Pemberton** —To me, one of the clearest through lines in your respective work is the focus on provenance—a sense of place, one’s beginnings, and how that history drags along with you into the present. Why, for both of you, does this preoccupation inform your stories, essays, and your perspectives in a time when provenance seems outmoded, when our origin stories seem like such small things in the world of thought and literature without borders?

 **Zadie Smith** —I’m always aware of the risk of being very boring, of being the ancient mariner talking about a particular place, a particular time. [Laughs] You can think of the careers of someone like Philip Roth, with his preoccupation, and obsession, with Newark. I don’t find it offensive in a writer. I think it’s one of the things writers do. **A certain kind of writer is preoccupied with locality. It can be strange and feel strange in this delocalized, globalized world. You can feel like a reject or something from a different era, for sure.**

 **Édouard Louis** —It’s precisely by writing from a localized place that you are able to understand anything, even your own self. There isn’t a border between the localized story or the universal story, it doesn’t really exist. I remember when I met Toni Morrison, she asked me, ‘Why is a gay white boy born in France in the ’90s interested in a straight black woman born in the ’30s?’ I told her, ‘That’s precisely the point.’ **It is because our experiences are so different that I was able to feel things in her work about domination, about exclusion, about a certain thing I experienced as a gay boy from the working class. It’s because it’s so different. It’s like when you are in a plane, and because you’re so far from earth, you are able to see the structure.**

 

> They never ask a white person from the bourgeoisie, ‘Why did you decide to write about the white bourgeoisie?’ 

 

 **Zadie Smith** -(...)but the sad thing for the writer that has awareness is that you’re always writing to the person who doesn’t think these things exist. I always resent it because I know I’m doing it. I’m trying to change somebody’s mind. It’s what Morrison says. **It’s a distraction. I don’t want to be bothered by anybody’s mind. I want to follow my own thoughts.**

 

 **Édouard Louis** -For me, there is a fundamental right for people not to carry their own story or the pain that they did not choose. It was essential in my second novel,  _The History of Violence_ , which deals mostly with rape, particularly with the rape that I endured. After I experienced that sexual assault, the police, doctors, and judges all wanted me to talk and testify about it again and again. **I didn’t want that because I didn’t want to carry a pain that I did not choose. I wanted other people to do it for me. On another level, as a gay person, I want straight people to fight for me.** I already suffered from it, like all gay or lesbian people. I don’t want to have to be forced to be the person to talk about it. That’s the thing that makes me very uncomfortable with the idea of appropriation. For me, it’s very strange and politically dangerous to say, ‘Okay, you are black, you have to talk about blackness. You’re gay, you have to talk about homophobia and homosexuality. If you’re trans, you have to talk about transphobia.’

 

 **Zadie** —For the serious young leftists out there, a way to critique it is to think of the way political ideas are connected to the concept of individual rights. That has now become the only political arena, but that’s not the only political arena. There are also collective duties. And a young leftist can, and should, think about collective duties. They can think about structural inequalities.

 

 **Zadie** —But that’s become impossible to say, Édouard. For my students, for younger people, it’s inconceivable that without personal identification to a subject you could have any expertise in it.

 **Édouard** —I mean, but our role is to say what is impossible to say, or we are useless, isn’t it?

 

**Zadie** —You have to stop sometimes. I find great comfort in thinking about the fact that I am not the only writer. If someone says to me, ‘What are you doing fiddling about? Who cares about this novel when there’s X, Y, and Z going on?’ I would agree to the extent that, if I was the only writer in the world we would be in really fucking deep trouble. But, luckily, I’m just a tributary going into a massive lake, and **there are so many of us, and we are doing so many different things. I can look across out my window and know that Ta-Nehisi [Coates] lives in the next building. He’s got a lot of things covered over there. I’ve got a poet upstairs, Terrance Hayes, and I know he’s got some poetry covered up there. No writer needs to be all the writers all the time. And I always really want to say this to my students because I can see their anxiety. You’re not the only one, and the fate of literature does not lie on your shoulder. It’s your job just to channel whatever it is that you have, even if it’s very small, even if it seems insignificant, and feed it into this river, this huge, collective bit of water called literature. And that will do.**

 

 


	10. RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD / BAKHTIN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/Bakhtin_Mikhail_Rabelais_and_His_World_1984.pdf

_INTRODUCTION_

* * *

 

 

 

Laughter and its forms represent, as we have said, the least scrutinized sphere of the people's creation. The narrow concept of popular character and of folklore was born in the pre-Romantic period and was basically completed by von Herder and the Romantics. There was no room in this concept for the peculiar culture of the marketplace and of folk laughter with all its wealth of manifestations. Nor did the generations that succeeded each other in that marketplace become the object of historic, literary, or folkloristic scrutiny as the study of early cultures continued. The element of laughter was accorded the least place of all in the vast literature devoted to myth, to folk lyrics, and to epics. Even more unfortunate was the fact that the peculiar nature of the people's laughter was completely distorted; entirely alien notions and concepts of humor, formed within the framework of bourgeois modern culture and aesthetics, were applied to this interpretation. **We may therefore say without exaggeration that the profound originality expressed by the culture of folk humor in the past has remained unexplored until now.**

And yet, the scope and the importance of this culture were immense in the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. A boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal cuIture. In spite of their variety. folk festivities of the carnival type, the comic rites and cults. the clowns and fools, giants, dwarfs, and jugglers, the vast and manifold literature of parody-all these forms have one style in common: they belong to one culture of folk carnival humor.

The manifestations of this folk culture can be divided into three distinct forms.

  1. _Ritual spectacles_ : carnival pageants, comic shows of the marketplace.
  2. _Comic verbal compositions_ : parodies both oral and written, in Latin and in the vernacular.
  3. _Various genres of billingsgate_ : curses, oaths, popular blazons.



These three forms of folk humor, reflecting in spite of their variety a single humorous aspect of the world, are closely linked and interwoven in many ways.

 

* * *

 

 

**1.**

All these forms of protocol and ritual based on laughter-and consecrated by tradition existed in all the countries of medieval Europe: they were sharply distinct from the serious official, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonials. **They offered a completely different, nonofficial, extraecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations; they built a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated moreorIess, in which they lived during a given time of the year.** If we fail to take into consideration this two-world condition, neither medieval cultural consciousness nor the cul ture of the Renaissance can be understood. To ignore or to underestimate the laughing people of the Middle Ages also distorts the picture of European culture's historic development.

 

The basis of laughter which gives form to carnival rituals frees them completely from all religious and ecclesiatic dogmatism, from all mysticism and piety. They are also completely deprived of the character of magic and prayer; **they do not command nor do they ask for anything.** Even more, certain carnival forms parody the Church's cult. All these forms are systematically placed outside the Church and religiosity. They belong to an entirely different sphere.

Because of their obvious sensuous character and their strong element of play, carnival images closely resemble certain artistic forms, namely the **spectacle**. In turn, medieval spectacles often tended toward carnival folk culture, the culture of the marketplace, and to a certain extent became one of its components. B **ut the basic carnival nucleus of this culture is by no means a purely artistic form nor a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play.**

 **While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it.** During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by all its participants.

 

**Thus carnival is the people's second life, organized on the basis of laughter. It is a festive life. Festivity is a peculiar quality of all comic rituals and spectacles of the Middle Ages.**

 

As opposed to the official feast, **one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal.** It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.

Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling, rank, and merits and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality. **On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival.** Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age. The hierarchical background and the extreme corporative and caste divisions of the medieval social order were exceptionally strong. Therefore such free, familiar contacts were deeply felt and formed an essential element of the carnival spirit. **People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations.** These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced. The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience, unique of its kind.

 

 

 **All the symbols of the carnival idiom are filled with this pathos of change and renewal** , with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities. **We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the "inside out" (à l'envers)** , of the "turnabout," of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings. A second life, a second world of folk culture is thus constructed: it is to a certain extent a parody of the extracarnival life, a "world inside out," **We must stress, however, that the carnival is far distant from the negative and formal parody of modern times. Folk humor denies, but it revives and renews at the same time. Bare negation is completely alien to folk** **culture.**

 

 

 

 

 

 

> Let us say a few initial words about the complex nature of carnival laughter. It is, first of all, a **festive** laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated "comic" event. Carnival laughter is **the laughter of all the people**. Second, it is universal in scope: **it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival's participants**. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is **ambivalent** : it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival.

 

The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed. **This is one of the essential differences of the people's festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times.** The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world's comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becames a private reaction. **The people's ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it.**

The greatest writer to complete the cycle of the people's carnival laughter and bring it into world literature was Rabelais. His work will permit us to enter into the complex and deep nature of this phenomenon.

 

* * *

 

 

**2.**

The Latin parody or semi-parody was widespread. The number of manuscripts belonging to this category is immense. The entire official ideology and ritual are here shown in their comic aspect. **Laughter penetrates the highest forms of religious cult and thought.** One of the oldest and most popular examples of this literature, "Cyprian's supper" ( _coena Cypriani_ ) offers a peculiar festive and carnivalesque travesty of the entire Scriptures.

 

[ _Latin written parody_ (red.SHBAB)] was created and preserved under the auspices of the "Paschal laughter," or of the "Christmas laughter"; it was in part directly linked, as in the parodies of liturgies and prayers, with the "feast of fools" and may have been performed during this celebration. There were other parodies in Latin: parodies of debates, dialogues, chronicles, and so forth. All these forms demanded from their authors a certain degree of learning. sometimes at a high level. All of them brought the echoes of carnival laughter within the walls of monasteries, universities, and schools.

The medieval epic parodies are animal, jesting, roguish, foolish; they deal with heroic deeds, epic heroes (the comic Roland), and knightly tales ("The Mule without a Bridle," "Aucassin and Nicolette"). There are various genres of mock rhetoric: carnivalesque debates, comic dialogues, and _euloges_. Carnivalesque humor is also reflected in the _fabliaux_ and in the peculiar comic lyrics of vagrant scholars. **All these genres are linked to carnivalesque forms and symbols more closely than the Latin parodies. But it is the medieval comic theater which is most intimately related to carnival.**

 

* * *

 

 

 

**3.**

A new type of communication always creates new forms of speech or a new meaning given to the old forms. **For instance, when two persons establish friendly relations, the form of their verbal intercourse also changes abruptly;** they address each other informally, abusive words are used affectionately, and mutual mockery is permitted. (In formal intercourse only a third person can be mocked.) The two friends may pat each other on the shoulder and even on the belly (a typical carnivalesque gesture). Verbal etiquette and discipline are relaxed and indecent words and expressions may be used. **But obviously such familiar intercourse in our days is far from the free familiar communication of the people in carnival time. It lacks the essentials: the all-human character, the festivity, utopian meaning, and philosophical depth.** Let us point out that elements of the old ritual of fraternization were preserved in the carnival and were given a deeper meaning. Some of these elements have entered modern life but have entirely lost their primitive connotation. The new type of carnival familiarity was reflected in a series of speech patterns.

 

* * *

 

 

All the influences we have analyzed have been known to scholars and have been studied by them, especially humorous literature in the vernacular. **But these influences have been examined separately, completely severed from their maternal womb-from the carnival, ritual, and spectacle.** (...) the scholars did not see the one deeply original humorous aspect of the world, presented in isolated fragments.

 

It is usually pointed out that in Rabelais' work the material bodily principle, that is, images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life, plays a predominant role. (...) Actually, the images of the material bodily principle in the work of Rabelais (and of the other writers of the Renaissance) are the heritage, only somewhat modified by the Renaissance, of the culture of folk humor. They are the heritage of that peculiar type of imagery and, more broadly speaking, of that peculiar aesthetic concept which is characteristic of this folk culture and which differs sharply from the aesthetic concept of the following ages. We shall call it conditionally the concept of **grotesque realism**. The material bodily principle in grotesque realism is offered in its all-popular festive and utopian aspect. The cosmic, social, and bodily elements are given here as an indivisible whole. And this whole is gay and gracious.

 **In grotesque realism, therefore, the bodily element is deeply positive.** It is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something **universal** , representing all the people. As such it is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and the body. We repeat: **the body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people's character** ; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized. **The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.**

This exaggeration has a positive, assertive character. The leading themes of these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming-over abundance. Manifestations of this life refer not to the isolated biological individual, not to the private, egotistic "economic man," but to **the collective ancestral body of all the people**. Abundance and the all-people's element also determine the gay and festive character of all images of bodily life; they do not reflect the drabness of everyday existence. The material bodily principle is a triumphant, festive principle, it is a "banquet for all the world." This character is preserved to a considerable degree in Renaissance literature, and most fully, of course, in Rabelais.  **The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.**

 

 

 

> One of the main attributes of the medieval clown was precisely the transfer of every high ceremonial gesture or ritual to the material sphere; such was the clown's role during tournaments, the knight's initiation, and so forth.

 

 

Degradation and debasement of the higher do not have a formal and relative character in grotesque realism. **"Upward" and "downward" have here an absolute and strictly topographical meaning. "Downward" is earth, "upward" is heaven. Earth is an element that devours, swallows up (the grave, the womb) and at the same time an element of birth, of renascence (the maternal breasts). Such is the meaning of "upward" and "downward" in their cosmic aspect, while in their purely bodily aspect, which is not clearly distinct from the cosmic, the upper part is the face or the head and the lower part is the genital organs, the belly, and the buttocks.**

To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. (...) Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. (...) Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.

 

Contrary to modern canons, **the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit** ; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. (...) This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, **the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other.** This especially strikes the eye in archaic grotesque.

In contrast to modern canons, the age of the body is most frequently represented in immediate proximity to birth or death, to infancy or old age, to the womb or the grave, to the bosom that gives life or swallows it up. But at their extreme limit the two bodies unite to form one. **The individual is shown at the stage when it is recast into a new mold. It is dying and as yet unfinished; the body stands on the threshold of the grave and the crib**. No longer is there one body, nor are there as yet two. Two heartbeats are heard: one is the mother's. which is slowed down.

The importance of **abusive language** is essential to the understanding of the literature of the grotesque. **Abuse exercises a direct influence on the language and the images of this literature and is closely related to all other forms of "degradation" and "down to earth" in grotesque and Renaissance literature.**

 

The Renaissance saw the body in quite a different light than the Middle Ages, in a different aspect of its life, and a different relation to the exterior nonbodily world. As conceived by these canons, the body was first of all a strictly completed, finished product. The age represented was as far removed from the mother's womb as from the grave, the age most distant from either threshold of individual life. (...) The individual body was presented apart from its relation to the ancestral body of the people. Such were the fundamental tendencies of the classic canons. It is quite obvious that from the point of view of these canons the body of grotesque realism was hideous and formless. I t did not fit the framework of the "aesthetics of the beautiful" as conceived by the Renaissance.

(The grotesque image never had such a canon.)

 

 

 

 

We find a characteristic discussion of laughter in one of the most remarkable works of Romantic grotesque, "The Night Watches" of Bonaventura (the pen name of an unknown author, perhaps Wetzel). These are the tales and thoughts of a night watchman. The narrator describes as follows the meaning of laughter:

 

 

> " **Is there upon earth a more potent means than laughter to resist the mockeries of the world and of fate? The most powerful enemy experiences terror at the sight of this satirical mask, and misfortune itself retreats before me, if I dare laugh at it. What else indeed except laughter does this earth deserve, may the devil take itl together with its sensitive companion, the moon.** "

These lines proclaim the philosophy and universal character of laughter, the characteristic trait of every expression of the grotesque. They praise its liberating power, but there is no hint of its power of regeneration. L **aughter loses its gay and joyful tone.** Speaking through the medium of his narrator, the night watchman, the author offers a curious explanation of laughter and of its mythical origin. Laughter was sent to earth by the devil, but it appeared to men **under the mask of joy** , and so they readily accepted it. Then laughter cast away its mask and looked at man and at the world with the eyes of angry satire. The transformation of the principle of laughter which permeates the grotesque, that is the loss of its regenerating power, leads to a series of other essential differences between Romantic grotesque and medieval and Renaissance grotesque. These differences appear most distinctly in relation to terror. **The world of Romantic grotesque is to a certain extent a terrifying world, alien to man.**

All that is ordinary, commonplace, belonging to everyday life, and recognized by all suddenly becomes meaningless, dubious and hostile. Our own world becomes an alien world. Something frightening is revealed in that which was habitual and secure. Such are the tendencies of Romantic grotesque in its extreme expression. If a reconciliation with the world occurs, it takes place in a subjective, lyric, or even mystic sphere. **On the other hand, the medieval and Renaissance folk culture was familiar with the element of terror only as represented by comic monsters, who were defeated by laughter.** Terror was turned into something gay and comic. Folk culture brought the world close to man, gave it a bodily form, and established a link through the body and bodily life, in contrast to the abstract and spiritual mastery sought by Romanticism. Images of bodily life, such as eating. drinking. copulation, defecation, almost entirely lost their regenerating power and were turned into "vulgarities."

In folk grotesque, **madness is a gay parody of official reason**. of the narrow seriousness of official "truth." It is a **"festive" madness**. In Romantic grotesque, on the other hand, madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual isolation.

 

 

 

 

 

> "The grotesque," says Victor Hugo, "is everywhere: on one hand, it creates the formless and the terrifying, on the other hand the comic, the buffoon-like,"

The essential aspect of this form is the monstrous; the aesthetics of the grotesque are to a certain extent the aesthetics of the monstrous. But at the same time Hugo reduces the intrinsic valueof the grotesque by declaring that **it is a means of contrasting the sublime**. The two complete each other, and their unity, most fully achieved in Shakespeare, produces the truly beautiful, which classicism could not attain.

 

We have already shown that the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, filled with the spirit of carnival, **liberates** the world from all that is dark and terrifying: **it takes away all fears and is therefore completely gay and bright.** All that was frightening in ordinary life is turned into amusing or ludicrous monstrosities. **Fear is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is defeated by laughter.** (We shall find an excellent elaboration of this theme in Rabelais' novel, especially in the Malbrough theme). Complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless world.

 

 

 

[ _redSHBAB._ in response to Kayser calling the groteque alien and terrifying and Bakhtin countering that it is actually light and a sign of death which leads to life, gay and ever changing] **Let us stress once more that the utopian element, the "golden age," was disclosed in the pre-Romantic period not for the sake of abstract thought or of inner experience; it is lived by the whole man, in thought and body. This bodily participation in the potentiality of another world, the bodily awareness of another world has an immense importance for the grotesque.**

The theme of death as renewal, the combination of death and birth, and the pictures of gay death play an important part in the system of grotesque imagery in Rabelais' novel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

> _It would be extremely interesting_
> 
> _to write the history of laughter._
> 
> (A. I. HERZEN)

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

_CHAPTER ONE_

_Rabelais in the History of Laughter_

 

 

The four-hundred-year history of the understanding, influence, and interpretation of Rabelais is closely linked with the history of laughter itself.

 

In other words, the men of Rabelais' time grasped the wholeness and order of the Rabelaisian aesthetic and ideological world, the unity of his style, and the harmony of all the elements that composed it, for they were informed by the same world outlook, by a single grand style.  **This is the essential difference in the appreciation of Rabelais' writings in the sixteenth century and in the years that followed. Con tern poraries understood this one grand style, while men of the next two centuries began to consider it as some strange individual idiosyncracy, or as some kind of secret code, a cryptogram containing a system of allusions to events and living persons of the author's time.**

 

When the grotesque is used to illustrate an abstract idea, its nature is inevitably distorted. **The essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life.** Negation and destruction (death of the old) are included as an essential **phase** , inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better. The very material bodily lower stratum of the grotesque image (food, wine, the genital force, the organs of the body) bears a deeply positive character. This principle is victorious, for the final result is always abundance, increase.

 

 

_on the grotesque images of Rabelais' time_

The positive nature of the image was thus submitted to the negative purpose of **satiric mockery and moral condemnation**. This satire was written from the point of view of the _bürger_ and the Protestant and was directed against feudal nobility (the _junker_ ), sunk into the mire of sloth, gluttony, drunkenness, and immorality. Precisely this grobianist point of view (influenced by Scheidt) formed in part the basis of Fischart's free translation of Rabelais.

 

_on Rabelais' position in literature throughout the years_

We know that this process [ _redSHBAB_ the crystallisation of hierarchy of literary genre] was completed in the seventeenth century, but it began to be felt as early as the sixteenth. At that time the appraisal of Rabelais as a merely amusing and gay author was already beginning to take shape. Such was also, as we know, the fate of Cervantes, whose _Don Quixot_ e was listed for a long time among the amusing books of light literature. At the end of the sixteenth century Rabelais descended lower and lower, to the very confines of great literature and was finally driven out of bounds. Montaigne, who was forty years younger than Rabelais, wrote in his essays: "As to simply amusing works ( _simplement plaisants_ ), I consider among the new books Boccaccio's Decameron, Rabelais, and Basia by Jean Second, if they can be referred to this category, worthy to divert us ( _dignes qu'en s'amuse_ )." However, Montaigne's "simply amusing" definition is still on the dividing line between the old and the new understanding of "amusing" ( _plaisant_ ), "gay" ( _joyeux_ ), "recreational" ( _recreatif_ ), and similar epithets applied to literary works and so often added to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century titles of these works.

 

The Renaissance conception of laughter can be roughly described as follows: **Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint.** Therefore, laughter is just as admissible in great literature, posing universal problems, as seriousness. Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter.

 

_on the medical and philosophical merits of laughter which influenced Rabelais_

**1.**

Aristotle & Hippocrates / Democritus, wiens gekte werd gezien aan de hand van zijn gelach

In the "Hippocratic novel" the laughter of Democritus had a philosophical character, being directed at the life of man and at all the vain fears and hopes related to the gods and to life after death. **Democritus here made of his laughter a whole philosophy, a certain spiritual premise of the awakened man who has attained virility. Hippocrates finally agreed with him**. The teaching concerning the therapeutic power of laughter in the "Hippocratic novel" received special recognition and notoriety at the Montpellier Medical School where Rabelais studied and later taught.

 

**2.**

The second source of the philosophy of laughter at the time of Rabelais was Aristotle's famous formula.

 

> **"Of all living creatures only man is endowed with laughter."**

laughter was seen as man's highest spiritual privilege, inaccessible to other creatures. As we know, it concludes Rabelais' introductory poem to Gargantua.

 

> Mieux est de ris que de larmes escrire.     /  _Better ti write about laughter than tears  
>  _Par ce que rire est Ie propre de I'homme. /  _For laughter is inherent to man_

Even Ronsard still uses this saying in its broader form; in his poem dedicated to Belleau we find these lines:

 

> Dieu qui soubz l'homme a Ie monde soumis,      /  _God who subjected the world to man,_  
>  A l'homme seul, le seul rire a permis                  /  _To man alone permitted laughter_  
>  Pour s'esgayer et non pas a la beste,                  /  _To be merry, not to the beast_  
>  Qui n'a raison ny esprit en la teste.                    /  _Who has neither reason nor spirit._

According to Aristotle, a child does not begin to laugh before the fortieth day after his birth; only from that moment does it become a human being. Rabelais and his contemporaries were also familiar with the saying of Pliny that only one man, Zoroaster, began to laugh at the time of his birth; this was interpreted as an omen of his divine wisdom.

 

**3.**

Finally, the third source of the Renaissance philosophy of laughter is Lucian, especially his image of **Menippus laughing in the kingdom of the dead**. Lucian's work " _Menippus, or the Descent into Hades_ " had an essential influence on Rabelais, more precisely on the episode of Epistemon's journey to hell in Pantagruel. Another important influence was Lucian's " _Dialogues_."

 

> "Menippus, Diogenes advises you, if mortal subjects for laughter begin to pall, come down below, and find much richer material; where you are now, there is always a dash of uncertainty in it; the question will always intrude, who can be quite sure about the hereafter? Here you can have your laugh out in security, like me." (Diogenes and Pollux)l
> 
> _"Oh, all right, Menippus; suppose you leave your independence behind you, and your plain-speaking and your indifference, and your high spirits and your jests. No one else here has a jest ..." (Charon, Hermes, and various shades)_
> 
> Charon: Where did you pick up this Cynic, Hermes? The noise he made on the crossing, too! laughing and jeering at all the rest, and singing, when everyone else was at his lamentations.
> 
> _Hermes: Ah, Charon, you little know your passenger! Independence, every inch of him: he cares for no one. 'Tis Menippus. (Charon and Menippus)_

 

All three sources define laughter as a universal philosophical principle that heals and regenerates; it is essentially linked to the ultimate philosophical questions concerning the " **regulation of life** " which Montaigne interprets in strictly serious tones. Rabelais and his contemporaries were also familiar, of course, with the antique conception of laughter from other sources-from Athenaeus, Macrobius, and others. **They knew Homer's famous words about the undestroyable, that is, eternal laughter of the gods** , and they were familiar with the Roman tradition of the freedom of laughter during the Saturnalia and the role of laughter during the triumphal marches and the funeral rites of notables. Rabelais in particular makes frequent allusion to these sources.

 

 

_about the combination of Latin and vernacular, the laughter and non-hierarchy of laughter in Middle Aged literature infulencing Rabelais_

A number of other factors concerned with the disintegration of the feudal and theocratic order of the Middle Ages also contributed to **the fusion of the official and nonofficial.** The culture of folk humor that had been shaped during many centuries and that had defended the people's creativity in nonofficial forms, in verbal expression or spectacle, could now rise to the high level of literature and ideology and fertilize it. Later, in times of absolute monarchy and the formation of a new official order, folk humor descended to the lower level of the genre hierarchy. There it settled and broke away from its popular roots, becoming petty, narrow, and degenerate.

 

In Rabelais we see the speech and mask of the medieval clown, folk and carnival gaiety, the defiance of the democratic cleric, the talk and gestures of the mountebank-all combined with humanist scholarship, with the physician'S science and practice, and with political experience.

 

As we have said, laughter in the Middle Ages remained **outside all official spheres of ideology and outside all official strict forms of social relations**. Laughter was eliminated from religious cult, from feudal and state ceremonials, etiquette, and from all the genres of high speculation. An intolerant, one-sided tone of seriousness is characteristic of official medieval culture. The very contents of medieval ideology-asceticism, somber providentialism, sin, atonement, suffering, as well as the character of the feudal regime. with its oppression and intimidation-all these elements determined this tone of **icy petrified seriousness**. It was supposedly the only tone fit to express the true. the good. and all that was essential and meaningful. Fear, religious awe, humility, these were the overtones of this seriousness. Early Christianity had already condemned laughter. Tertullian, Cyprian. and John Chrysostom preached against ancient spectacles, especially against the mime and the mime's jests and laughter. **John Chrysostom declared that jests and laughter are not from God but from the devil**. Only permanent seriousness, remorse, and sorrow for his sins befit the Christian.

But this intolerant seriousness of the official church ideology made it necessary to legalize the gaiety, laughter, and jests which had been eliminated from the canonized ritual and etiquette. Thus forms of pure laughter were created parallel to the official forms. At the same time certain religious cults inherited from antiquity were influenced by the East and in some cases by local pagan rites, especially by the rites of fertility. Rudiments of gaiety and laughter are present in these forms. They can be found in the liturgy and in funeral rites, as well as in the rites of baptism, of marriage, and in other religious services. But these rudiments are sublimated and toned down. If performed in a zone near a church, they had to be authorized. These rites of pure laughter were even permitted as a parallel to the official cuIts. Such were first of all the "feasts of fools" ( _festa stultorum_ , _faturorum_ , _follorum_ ) (...) These celebrations were originally held in the churches and bore a fully legitimate character. Later they became only semilegal, and at the end of the Middle Ages were **completely banned from the churches but continued to exist in the streets and in taverns, where they were absorbed into carnival merriment and amusements**. The feast of fools showed a particular obstinacy and force of survival in France ( _fê_ _te des fous_ ). This feast was actually a parody and travesty of the official cult, with masquerades and improper dances.

 

**Nearly all the rituals of the feast of fools are a grotesque degradation of various church rituals and symbols and their transfer to the material bodily level.**

 

foolishness and folly, that is, laughter, are directly described as "man's second nature" and are opposed to the monolith of the Christian cult and ideology. Laughter at the feast of fools was not, of course, an abstract and purely negative mockery of the Christian ritual and the Church's hierarchy. **The negative derisive element was deeply immersed in the triumphant theme of bodily regeneration and renewal. It was "man's second nature" that was laughing, the lower bodily stratum which could not express itself in official cult and ideology.**  

 

 

The attraction of folk humor was strong at all the levels of the young feudal hierarchy, both lay and ecclesiastical. This can be explained as follows:

  1. The official ecclesiastical and feudal culture of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries was still weak and not completely formed.
  2. Folk culture was strong and impossible to ignore; some of its elements had to be used for propaganda.
  3. The tradition of the Roman Saturnalia and other forms of Roman legalized folk humor was still alive.
  4. The Church adapted the time of Christian feasts to local pagan celebrations (in view of their christianization), and these celebrations were linked to cults of laughter.
  5. The young feudal system was still relatively progressive and therefore of a relatively popular nature.



 

 

 

 

But we must here stress once more the essential relation of festive laughter to time and to the change of seasons. (...) Here appeared the relation to the change of seasons, to the phases of the sun and moon, to the death and renewal of vegetation, and to the succession of agricultural seasons. In this succession all that is new or renews, all that is about to draw nearer is emphasized as a positive element. And this element acquires a wider and deeper meaning: it expresses the people's hopes of a happier future, of a more just social and economic order, of a new truth. The gay aspect of the feast presented this happier future of a general material affluence, equality, and freedom, just as the Roman Saturnalia announced the return of the Golden Age. **Thus, the medieval feast had, as it were, the two faces of Janus. Its official, ecclesiastical face was turned to the past and sanctioned the existing order, but the face of the people of the marketplace looked into the future and laughed, attending the funeral of the past and present.**

 

The material bodily lower stratum and the entire system of degradation, turnovers, and travesties presented this essential relation to time and to social and historical transformation. One of the indispensable elements of the folk festival was **travesty** , that is, the renewal of clothes and of the social image. Another essential element was **a reversal of the hierarchic levels:** the jester was proclaimed king, a clownish abbot, bishop, or archbishop was elected at the "feast of fools," and in the churches directly under the pope's jurisdiction a mock pontiff was even chosen. The members of this hierarchy of fools sang solemn mass. At many of these feasts kings and queens were elected for a day, as on Epiphany and on St. Valentine's day. The custom of electing such ephemeral kings and queens ( _rois pour rire_ ) was especially widespread in France, where nearly every popular banquet was presided over by them. **From the wearing of clothes turned inside out and trousers slipped over the head to the election of mock kings and popes the same topographical logic is put to work: shifting from top to bottom, casting the high and the old, the finished and completed into the material bodily lower stratum for death and rebirth.** These changes were placed into an essential relation with time and with social and historical change. The element of relativity and of becoming was emphasized, in opposition to the immovable and extratemporal stability of the medieval hierarchy.

 

> It is the playing boy of Heraclitus who possesses the supreme power in the universe (" **domination belongs to the child** ").

 

But the medieval culture of folk humor actually belonged to all the people. The truth of laughter embraced and carried away everyone; nobody could resist it.

 

[p.107]


End file.
